Celebrities Then And Now

The costs of bodyguards and house security can be very high. “Rapper 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, admitted that he spends $20,000 a week on security at his Farmington, Connecticut, mansion.” CNN reports that "...Jackson's expenditures are in the lower end of what most high-profile individuals pay to protect themselves, their families and their property." According to a security expert, the cost of security for a celebrity is as follows: "For one day, if you need one truck (e.g. a Suburban) with a driver and three security agents, you are looking at $4,000 a day, and use that four days a week, then you can easily see spending $20,000 a week." "Britney Spears...spends nearly half a million dollars a year for security." Security costs for families of celebrities run even higher: "If you are looking to protect a celebrity family like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie..., the price tag for job like that is going to be around $1 million to $1.4 million a year..."
As a mass media phenomenon
In the 1970s, academics began analyzing the phenomenon of celebrity and stardom. According to Sofia Johansson the "canonical texts on stardom" include Daniel Boorstin's The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) and 1970s articles by Boorstin, Alberoni, and Dyer which examined the "representations of stars and on aspects of the Hollywood star system." Johansson notes "more recent analyses within media and cultural studies" in the 1990s and 2000s have instead dealt with the idea of a pervasive, contemporary, 'celebrity culture'."