Why celebrities are the greatest works of art today

I dip in and out of internet discourse. Where once I was fully submerged and attuned, now I creep in when I can’t sleep, and briefly see what everyone’s talking about before fleeing in confusion. Because of this, the topics of the day, the watercooler stuff, often look inexplicable to me.

Lately, for instance, I’ve been baffled by the waves of chatter and backlash about the actress Sydney Sweeney. Sweeney is a 26-year-old star who made her name in the HBO teen drama Euphoria (2019-present), in which a group of teenagers dabble in escapades that make the once-controversial 2000s series Skins look like CBeebies. Since then, she has become one of the biggest young stars in Hollywood.

So far, so filler: a beautiful young blonde becomes famous. Yet though Sweeney has generated almost no personal controversy – as I write this, the headlines about her are that she “doesn’t really like coffee” – she’s attracting fevered dissection every day. The popularity of her large breasts, for example, are said by armchair cultural theorists, as reported in Slate magazine, to be a sign of the “woke era” ending. Her pleasant demeanour, meanwhile, is interpreted by gloating conservatives as a return to the submissive-woman archetype. The blankness of Sweeney’s old-fashioned, generic celebrity seems to have driven people mad, and compelled them to fashion her into whatever object they desire.

Philippa Snow, the excellent young British essayist, has written a short but splendid book named Trophy Lives on the subject of our relationship toward the new celebrity, and the ways in which their lives have become artworks in themselves. It’s a subject that inspires instinctive, pre-emptive dread in me, the feeling that there cannot possibly be anything new to contribute – or that the reflection will come down to some woolly aphoristic conclusion: it was the phones all along, or reality TV, or plastic surgery, et cetera.

Yet the genius of a writer such as Snow is that she’s capable not only of delineating these issues, but of rendering them exciting to read about. Her previous book, Which As You Know Means Violence (2022), about cultural figures who hurt themselves for our gratification, was a similarly illuminating work. With a consistent output of superlative essays, too, for the likes of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Frieze, her work sits outside the soul-deadening churn of most cultural criticism, which merely names an artwork or phenomenon, then regurgitate the most commonly tweeted responses to it.