Column | When Dua met Olga: the rising influence of celebrity taste-makers

Olga Tokarczuk's YouTube interview with Dua Lipa showcases the power of celebrities as taste-makers in literature and culture.

The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, author of novels such as Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, is one of the most critically acclaimed writers of the last decade, having won both the Nobel and the International Booker Prize in that time-frame. It’s safe to say that she has added thousands of new readers over the past few years, thanks to these accomplishments. And recently, Tokarczuk participated in a YouTube interview that may have landed her an army of new followers — a conversation with Dua Lipa, one of the biggest pop stars on the planet.

Hosted on Lipa’s lifestyle platform Service95 (named after the fact that the singer was born in 1995), the 30-minute interview already has over 200,000 views and it’s been just two weeks. The conversation was centred around Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead but towards the end, Lipa made sure that her fans got an overall idea of the themes prevalent in Tokarczuk’s body of work: eco-feminism, man’s rapidly shifting relationship with animals, the mechanisms guiding memory and trauma.

Obviously, Lipa is a voracious reader. But I have to tip my hat to the team that manages Service95. The interviews and podcasts are well-researched, and thanks to Lipa herself, well-executed. She has now interviewed literary heavy hitters such as George Saunders and Chimamanda Adichie, musicians like Patti Smith, and comedians like Trevor Noah, doing a stellar job in each case.

Service95 is the latest example of a phenomenon that has driven a lot of mass media culture in the 21st century — the idea of celebrities being “taste-makers”, introducing their followers to books, movies, music, art, décor, health and wellness, et al. Celebrities aren’t just offering the odd standalone ‘tip’ anymore, they are curating their followers’ entire lives, online and offline. It’s the logical endpoint of the kind of brand/ marketing thinking that tells these celebrities, “You ARE the product”. A lot of fans will pick up that book or stream that film not because they are convinced of the merits of the work, but because their favourite celebrity told them to do so. And in doing so, they will advance the personal, para-social relationship they have with the celebrity.

Oprah Winfrey is the template for this phenomenon, especially the ‘Oprah’s Book Club’ segment on her show. The segment debuted in 1996 and by the turn of the millennium, it had become a cultural juggernaut, with publishers estimating that Winfrey’s power to sell a book is anywhere from 20 to 100 times that of any other media personality (Publisher’s Weekly, 2005).

Today, the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Drew Barrymore have their own book clubs, and legions of fans who hang on to their every word. Former U.S. president Barack Obama’s end-of-the-year lists too have become a staple of American pop culture. It has become one of the most popular ways in which American youngsters are discovering books, films, music, etc. from around the world — a much-needed antidote to American exceptionalism, one might say. In recent years, Obama has picked quite a few Indian artists and writers — in 2019, Prateek Kuhad’s song ‘cold/mess’, and more recently, the Payal Kapadia film All We Imagine As Light. Indians on social media have reacted rapturously to these picks — they see it as representation, Indian pop culture reaching millions of homes and computers that would not have otherwise got a taste of them.

Closer home, a few Indian celebrities have made the first tentative moves in this direction. In 2019, Twinkle Khanna launched Tweak, a digital media platform for women. A couple of years later, Tweak Books was announced, and it has now co-published with Juggernaut (who also publish Khanna’s own books). On Tweak, you can find interviews with writers, artists, filmmakers, as well as “uplifting” stories from across the country. It is a slightly different, more organised model of ‘curation’ than Oprah or Obama’s, but it is definitely on the same spectrum.