There's a star in my future - Shown at Crib, Brussels (2025)
Palm Springs, oil on canvas, 200 x 80cm (2025). Picture by Luca Borrini
Exhibition catalog, 132 pages, printed in 100 copies in Brussels, 2025
Designed by Poline Maréchal, edited by DCKPExhibition Text written by Paul Perruçon
Every object in the room is a machinery of desires, graces and seduction. Everything so fragile. Commodities gased up on a magic that’s blue, orange, pink, pixelated as an incipient memory. I don't want to move since the inside of my body is made of glass, laying still in my bed: if your brightness could penetrate my veins, all the reflections would be like a festival tearing the night apart inside of me. I feel cold, so close.
Yet you are, as I am. You are dead, on stage, away, on screen, alive. I am one of the shadows you carry everywhere, every time you’re seen on an image. We are an army, a single body that is your body. We’ve build reliquaries, weapons, cities, prayers all because of you. You shaped us as we are shaping you back, we are together, adrift in a sea of authorless anthems.
And I can’t help but feeling strong and sad, the strongest person in the world. Your picture is fading away as if the screen or the film was burning. A shrine of flashing lights blinding us all in bliss. I fall, disappearing at last in some haute couture sunrise, a choir of angels chanting all of your songs, all melted in one drone-like spiritual. As Norma said, “you don’t yell at a sleepwalker, he may fall and break his neck”. On the boulevard, addicts stumble, bearing bodies too terrestrial.
“Marilyn won’t ever R.I.P.”, extract from the catalog, written by Mélodie Sylvestre
Despite her suicide in '62, I seem to encounter her languid gaze and full smile anywhere I go, shining in shopping malls and cinema restrooms. Her favorite Guerlain lipstick is regularly sold out, and her memorabilia prized by collectors. Every year, she becomes several million dollars richer, placing her among Forbes’ top-earning dead celebrities.
Whether we like it or not, our personal and collective imaginations are wallpapered with images of stars, like posters on a teen’s bedroom wall. What plays out between them and us mixes identification, desire and consumption. They embody collective points of reference in our social landscapes, and our positioning, whether fan or hater, can play a central role in defining our identities. Some celebrities can even be seen as secular deities, with the notion of fandom appearing to be a prerequisite for this status. While the term traditionally refers to excessive adoration, today anyone can be considered a fan of a celebrity or a work of art, without there necessarily being any claim to significance attached to it. But beyond our personal preferences, celebrities also serve as symbols of social mobility, sustaining the illusion that material affluence is accessible to everyone, as long as they're a little talented, lucky and willing to work hard. Celebrity culture upholds the American Dream, continually shaping our expectations of what it means to be successful.
On August 5, 1962, the naked body of Marilyn Monroe was found lifeless in her bed, after an overdose of barbiturates. In the month following this announcement, the suicide rate rose by 12% in the United States, making it one of the most impactful deaths of the 20th century. She became another case study of the Werther effect - the fact that a high-profile suicide triggers a wave of copycats. Just like many of the elements that made up Marilyn's identity and life, her death immediately tipped over into the public domain and took on the magnitude of a collective phenomenon.
One of the defining characteristics of television and social networks is that they allow the illusion of a face-to-face experience with the performer, reinforcing a presumed intimacy. The death of a star often reactivates this one-way bond. Personally, I remember bursting into tears while shopping with my mother when she told me Amy Winehouse had died. I was shocked, because I didn't even know how much I loved her…
Some bloggers don't hesitate to use strong words to describe their attachment to an icon they adored: "When you transcended, I lost a friend”, “ There was some metaphysical bond between us or something.” Similarly, one woman, mourning the death of Heath Ledger, compared her grief to the loss of her golden retriever who passed away on the same day as the actor. She then concludes that the dog was "at his side when they walked through the pearly gates”, explaining that “I felt like I knew you, because I watched you on TV. You were in my living room all the time.”
Since its emergence as a dominant industry, Hollywood has nurtured its star system by exploiting this confusion between media presence, physical proximity and emotional connection. The first magazine explicitly aimed at fans of film stars was published in 1911, followed by dozens of other titles over the next decade. They included anecdotes sometimes invented by the studios themselves, with the aim of strengthening the public's attachment to the stars. For producers, using stars was above all a strategy to reduce (not always effectively) the risks of an investment, which was essential in the context of the Great Depression.
Right up to the present day, celebrities have continued to be promoted as the guarantors of a work's quality, and to some extent endorse its publicity. The place they occupy has evolved in tandem with technological developments and our use of the media. The spectacle of their private lives has become entertainment and a business in itself, as we saw in the 2000s and 2010s, with the proliferation of tabloids and the emergence of reality TV. My generation grew up alongside the widespread violence directed at the it-girls of the time, harassed by the paparazzi and the celebrity press, captivating the public with a mix of pleasure and disgust. But despite the normalisation of this outpouring of stolen images and sensational headlines, the emergence of social networks has also enabled some of them to take control of their public image and maintain a direct connection with their audiences. As Philipa Snow argues in Trophy Lives (2024), by reclaiming their authorship over the construction of their image and physique, they are, in a sense, becoming both the artists and the artwork itself, much like Kim Kardashian’s performative display of her life or Paris Hilton’s persona. In both cases, whether the images are stolen or curated, the illusion of intimacy and understanding public figures continues to operate.
Ultimately, this facade only deepens the distance between the public and the star – just as Snow puts it about Lindsay Lohan: “We can see her pubis and her mugshots and the powder in her nostrils, but it is impossible for us, as regular, unfamous people, to know what it feels like to be her.”
When I got interested in what Marilyn Monroe's grave might look like, I learned that Hugh Hefner had paid $75,000 to have his own grave next to hers. Her grave marker is regularly covered with traces of kisses, taking on the role of a shrine where homage and personal longing are visibly expressed. More broadly, the economy built around her memorabilia seems to be in pretty good shape. Her white dress, immortalised as she flies over a metro station in Seven Years of Reflection, sold for over 4 million dollars, and a lock of her hair is fetching gold on ebay. For many, these items tied to a star's aura embody a closeness to that person; the objects circulate after death like relics, preserving veneration for the icon. The controversy that arose when Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn’s dress at the Met Gala in 2022, further illustrates how these objects, especially those which hold a special place in the star’s iconography, can make it possible to ‘own’ a part of these celebrities.
To take an interest in her is, in the end, to approach the star as an ontological construct, as she is seen as the embodiment of various Hollywood tropes, from the self-made woman and the femme fatale on screen, to the tragic figure of a fallen star. After her death, like many others, her legend was maintained by conspiracy theories : Overdose? Assassination ordered by the Kennedys? Or did she fake her death and secretly rebuild a modest life as a Walmart salesgirl ? Such alternative stories inevitably arise when a superstar dies. A way, perhaps, of negotiating the inevitability of her demise… but either way, her career keeps going, with or without her. The hijacking of her image in pop culture and art has marked the end of the century until the present days, turning her into a symbol, even a brand; someone whose face will forever function as a logo. That's how she was resurrected in a 2011 advert for the perfume “J'adore” by Dior, alongside Grace Kelly and Marlène Dietrich. Maybe one day, she'll be performing as a hologram ?
As Robert M. Rubin summed it up: “The golden age of the movies is over. [...] And yet, the icons of Hollywood have richly circulating afterlives which belie the alleged obsolescence of the medium. It's a goddam zombie apocalypse. Except you can't shoot 'em in the head and be done with them, like you can a walker. They're everywhere.”