The Futures Company

Andrew Curry writes:

I think we sometimes under-estimate the power of the relationship between our increasingly audio-visual world and the rise of celebrity culture. And the second part of this story is about the way in which media coverage of celebrity is a classic form of ‘reveal and conceal’ narrative, where the audience is simultaneously invited into this world of money and power and exclusivity and also excluded from it. Media empires have been built in the space between knowing and not knowing. Some of the sharpest commentary on this world has been in the work of the artist Alison Jackson, who works with celebrity lookalikes. TED.com has just posted a revealing lecture she gave in Oxford three years ago. It runs just under 20 minutes – and some of the images she uses to illustrate her talk are not for the easily shocked.

The picture at the top is a publicity still for Jackson’s Channel 4 film, Blaired Vision, shown last year. She’s interviewed about it here. And yes, that is a Blair lookalike: she’s currently looking for Gordon Browns for her latest project, apparently.