My heart broke a little bit outside the doors of the ROM on Tuesday night. Just before the 4th Annual Eva Holtby Lecture, I watched as several elderly people were turned away due to lack of capacity — people who have likely followed the guest speaker, Lewis Lapham, throughout the course of his career. Lapham is an esteemed editor, writer, intellectual and the founder of Lapham’s Quarterly. He was invited to address the audience on his thoughts about celebrity in contemporary culture as someone who refrains from revering celebrities in any way.
What I heard was not that unusual, but it all sounded better dressed up in Lapham’s smooth, liquid voice and wise-looking glasses. During his lecture, he compared modern day celebrities to the demi-gods of Greek mythology, celebrity worship to polytheism. He lent some credence to my observation that celebrities are exotic animals — the most heightened humans of us all — something I feel the ROM’s Vanity Fair portrait exhibit currently highlights. Lapham referred to our very own Marshall McLuhan, saying McLuhan hit it spot-on when he ruled that “the medium is the message.” On this point, Lapham casts celebrities as the medium — hollow actors on the world stage, vessels for us to manufacture, pick apart and discard. Whether these mediums/celebrities are objects of any consequence — whether their work means something or not — is irrelevant. We live in an age where the actor is revered above the act.
This is all very hierarchical, undemocratic and depressing, unless you decide for yourself that maybe it’s not so bad, all this idol worship. Celebrities have served many different purposes for me: they’ve been surrogate mothers, friends, sisters and teachers. The fact that I don’t really know any of the people I’ve selected to admire over the years, or the fact that they are merely empty shells on which I project, is not necessarily a bad thing. If I’ve been able to find bits of myself in their work, or in their faces, all blown up to movie screen size, and that has been healthy for me, who cares? Who cares if celebrities are overexposed and over-exalted if they serve a purpose by allowing us to see ourselves through them?
This weekend, if you need a break from intellectualism like Lapham’s complex philosophical musings, you can head over to the Mandingue Summit, the West African Arts and Drum Festival. Instead of projecting onto celebrities, you can project onto the ancient drum and seek out your own personal beat and rhythm. The Mandingue hail from the Empire of Mali, which encompassed a huge geographical area with disparate languages and religious traditions all tied together by a common love of the drum. There are Mandingue influences in contemporary music, and this weekend’s Summit will highlight them for you with three days of events including film screenings, drum workshops, African storytelling for kids, dance workshops and a performance by the award-winning band Percussions Bolo Kan. For a complete schedule, click here. I’m hoping that some West African soul drumming will help repair any heartbreak still remaining from Tuesday night’s talk at the ROM, or any heartbreak any of us might have faced this past week.
Leanne is an associate at Heenan Blaikie LLP. She spends her free time indulging in art, film, music and literature and swears that culture tastes better than chocolate. Her column will appear every Friday here on lawandstyle.ca.