THE CULT OF CELEBRITY has now reached almost every corner of life but its differentiation from fame, even greatness, remains an endlessly contested question. To ‘think continually of those who were truly great’ – to adapt the once-famous first line of a poem by Stephen Spender – is still a national preoccupation. But if such things are to be judged by those compelling lists drawn up by public polls for television programmes such as ‘The Greatest Briton’, there is obviously some confusion between unimpeachable achievement and popular acclaim. In ‘The Greatest Briton’, for example, Sir Winston Churchill headed the list of ten, with Brunel in second place, and Diana, Princess of Wales, in third, easily outdoing Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin and Nelson. The element of blind hero worship still plays its part but it has been increasingly inflected by a notion of demotic familiarity. In a media-driven culture, with its instant fixes of accessible knowledge, this has led to a commercialised sense of fame. It has become a commodity to suit a low general expectation. Famous figures of the past, men and women of enduring stature, are now treated as equals of those who occupy today’s transient headlines – and vice versa. Fuelling this is a much increased knowledge of past figures and the way we can now reveal what formerly was kept under wraps by social mores or a family’s appellation contrôlée. The foibles and failings, the small undermining hypocrisies and petty meannesses of the great are now woven more intimately into the fabric of fame, making some figures more endearing or, at the least, more ‘contemporary’, while others are shuffled off into the outhouse of history. It might be presumed that no amount of personal revelation would alter the esteem in which the achievements of the newly naked figure are held. But we know this is not so, just as the preoccupations of today’s society inevitably fashion our interpretation of works of art from the past, sometimes enriching and sometimes tarnishing them.

Several current exhibitions in London give rise to a consideration of these various aspects of ‘being famous’. The whole premise of the selection of Joshua Reynolds’s work at Tate Britain (to 18th September)1 is based on the investigation of the role his portraiture played in the promotion of the celebrated figures of his time. If the show had focused solely on images of those people whose fame is still bright, it would have been considerably reduced in scale and entertainment. As it is, the great names – Gibbon, Johnson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Boswell – rub head-and-shoulders in the exhibition with courtesans and clerics, officers and gentlemen, many only now remembered because they sat to Sir Joshua. These one-time celebrities are the necessary occupants of the pond of renown’s lower depths, as the flashy koi carp that were the Streatham Worthies swim above them. Although many of Reynolds’s finest works are on view, any assessment of him as a painter is bound to be influenced by the biographical tenor of each room – ‘Aristocrats’, ‘Heroes’, ‘Painted Women’ – the gossipy wall labels and ‘period’ chairs.

The other main summer exhibition at Tate Britain is shaped by celebrity of a different kind and from another viewpoint. A Picture of Britain (to 4th September) is a show tied to a recent six-part series made for BBC television and bears all the wounds of a media-led enterprise. The series was presented by the well-known political commentator and broadcaster David Dimbleby, scion of a celebrated broadcasting family. It surveyed aspects of the British landscape, as seen through the works of painters, writers and composers, in a whistle-stop tour undertaken by the amiable Dimbleby, which whisked the viewer from the Balmoralised Scottish Highlands to St Ives and Brighton Pier. Early on, there were faint hopes that the presenter (fed by Tate Britain curators) might have something to say, but these were dashed in a blizzard of clichés and the lulling effects of ‘fine’ photography. This was celebrity Britain at its cosiest, a corral of ‘heritage’ spots and august motifs from a metropolitan hiker’s point of view. The exhibition, dotted with masterpieces as well as little-known works, mirrors the thematic guided tour of the programmes. That the Tate should go into business with television is neither new nor unexpected nor deplorable. That it should show itself to be so dominated by its partner, however, gives cause for concern.

No such reservations need apply to the National Portrait Gallery’s The World’s Most Photographed (to 23rd October), another collaboration with the BBC.4 This is an unashamed commercial venture exploiting today’s fascination with the reality and myth of being famous. It shows the manipulation of the public image, through photography, of ten household names from Queen Victoria and Hitler to Gandhi and Greta Garbo. It is informative, covers new ground and has moments of pathos and amusement. Just as painted and sculpted portraits from the past were composed and edited for public consumption, photography has done the same but with a greater variety of purpose and a more far-reaching impact than was previously possible. Now that the National Portrait Gallery devotes most of its temporary exhibitions to photographs (the chief exception in the near future is Self Portrait. Renaissance to Contemporary – sixty ‘carefully selected self-portraits in oil painting’), and television believes it is improving its image through bed-hopping with the national collections and engaging household names in order to appeal to the public, it is guaranteed that celebrities, whether famous or not, dumbed up or dumbed down, are here to stay.

1  The exhibition was reviewed in the June 2005 issue of this Magazine, pp.428–29.
2  Catalogue: A Picture of Britain. By David Dimbleby, with essays by David Blayney Brown, Richard Humphreys and Christine Riding. 244 pp. incl. 184 col. pls. +
6 b. & w. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2005), £19.99. ISBN 1–85437–566–0.
3  For a recent, extreme example of the celebrity-curator re-packaging works for popular consumption, see the review in this issue (pp.572–73) of Il male, staged in Turin by Vittorio Sgarbi.
4  Catalogue: The World’s Most Photographed. By Robin Muir. 200 pp. incl. 190 col. pls. + b. & w. ills. (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2005), £25. ISBN 1–85514–353–4.