Do you have a favorite celebrity? Or perhaps there’s a team, television series, video game, movie director or cast of a play or musical you like best.
Other than talking to you about this passion, how can people tell you’re a fan? Do you wear clothing with the person’s, team’s or work’s name on it? Is your bedroom or the inside of your locker a shrine to that one thing? Are you easy to shop for at holidays because everyone already knows exactly who and what you love?
Or, on the other hand, do you prefer not to broadcast your passion for everyone to see?
In “$650,000 in Pop Star Memorabilia? These Superfans Know Few Limits.,” Derrick Bryson Taylor writes about adults whom he calls “megafans of megastars.” Many began building their collections when they were children or teenagers. He writes:
In a room in his house in London, a 52-year-old spray tan artist named James Harknett has carefully arranged more than 12,500 items connected, in one way or another, to Madonna.
Along with CDs, vinyl records, store displays and magazines like Smash Hits and Record Mirror, Harknett’s collection includes an oversize rhinestone bracelet that the pop megastar flaunted in her video for “Material Girl” in 1985, not one but three of the costumes that she wore in the Academy Award-winning film “Evita,” from 1996, and over 200 pieces of framed imagery.
It all began when Harknett was 11 (“I was completely captivated,” he said), and he estimates that over the past four decades he has shelled out more than $650,000 on Madonna memorabilia. In 2004, he wanted to buy a mint-condition copy of a vintage issue of Island magazine, which featured Madonna on the cover, but tickets to 18 stops of her Re-Invention tour that year meant he couldn’t afford it.
Harknett is far from alone in his zealous commitment to collecting a beloved megastar’s memorabilia — and these days, as he and his fellow devotees are keenly aware, there are perhaps more collectibles out there than ever before. (Just ask Taylor Swift’s marketing team.)
The article also delves into the history of collecting memorabilia and the psychology behind it:
George Newman, a psychologist who teaches at the University of Toronto, said supercollectors felt the same heartache in parting with items that so many others do. “Many people find those to be irreplaceable and would be devastated if they lost it,” he said.
This kind of hard-core collecting — driven by a deep emotional bond but also by a belief in what Newman called contagion (that a celebrity’s star power transfers itself to an associated object) — has, in fact, been around for thousands of years. Robert Thompson, who studies popular culture at Syracuse University, said the trend dated to ancient Rome, where Pliny the Elder was a noted autograph collector.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, collectors like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johannes Brahms compiled their autographs into albums. “You’d carry these books around, and it became a kind of testament to all the important people you knew,” Thompson said.
But it wasn’t always autographs. Within three days of Beethoven’s death in 1827, so many mourners had clipped tufts of his hair that they had turned a head famous for its flowing locks into a bald pate.
Students, read the entire article and then tell us:
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What surprised you the most about what you read? Why? Do the people interviewed remind you of yourself or anyone else you know? Does the article help you better understand the motivation behind collecting such memorabilia?
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Do you own any fan memorabilia? If so, what do you have, and what do those items mean to you? Would you like to have a collection as large as those of the people you read about in the article?
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How would you describe your fandom of your favorite celebrity, team or work? Do you revere that person or thing? Admire what he, she or it does or creates? Feel helped or shaped by the object of your fandom in some way? Explain.
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Have you ever felt pressure to buy certain items as a way to show your devotion or to prove that you went to a concert or game? Do you think that people ever go too far in collecting memorabilia? Do you think stars ever exploit their fans by offering too many variations of, say, an album on vinyl, as some have accused Taylor Swift of doing?
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Have you ever met a famous person and gotten an autograph or taken a photograph with that person? If so, tell us the story, and explain how it feels when you look at that autograph or photo. If not, is there someone you would like to meet in person someday? Why or why not?
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Finally, the stars you just read about have been around for decades. What stars of today do you think will still inspire memorabilia collectors 20 or 30 years from now? Why?
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.
The post Do You Collect Fan Memorabilia? appeared first on New York Times.
