![]() Plastic can be worth just as much as gold, if people believe it is. Set against this is the idea that such “God-given” talents can, however, be diligently imitated – and that an “artificial” star can become as famous as an “authentic” one. (In Dürer’s 1500 self-portrait, the artist appears face-on in a pose usually reserved for depictions of Jesus.) Self-Made is strong on the weirdly mystical dimensions of celebrity: the notion that there are innate qualities that can be nurtured but not learned or taught. As belief in God as the arbiter of destiny began to wane, faith in humans’ ability to shape their own selves and therefore their lives grew. Self-Made picks up that thread, identifying a key imaginative shift during the Renaissance as the foundation of our 21st-century world of selfies and brand collabs. ![]() Her previous book, Strange Rites, unpacked the ways in which people stubbornly continue to create meaning, ritual and faith in supposedly ever more secular western societies. Today’s influencers have two historical ancestors, Burton argues: the ‘natural aristocrat’ and the ‘self-made man’īurton is a scholar of religion in its broadest sense.
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