Why Are We Obsessed With Celebrities: is it mostly about "she's famous, so she must be awesome"?

Having attended that Amitabh Bachchan lecture, and thus having witnessed a massive examination hall packed with hundreds of people (i.e., almost every Indian in Oxford) desperately trying to get photos and videos of the great star, has once again got me thinking about the strange pull celebrity culture seems to have on our lives. I have long thought that in this modern information age, the fame and influence of a handful of top celebrities gets magnified far beyond anything their intrinsic abilities or value to society could possibly justify. Consider J. K. Rowling, or Sachin Tendulkar, or Shah Rukh Khan: they are all obviously highly talented, and I admire of all of them, but are they, in any sense, so far superior to most other authors or sportspersons or actors so as to justify their enormously incommensurate status and wealth? It's hard to argue that they are, and I don't suppose anyone would disagree that beyond a certain point fame becomes self-perpetuating: as they say, nothing succeeds like success. In the age of the internet and social media and ubiquitous advertising, these feedback effects seem to have become much stronger than they were even a generation ago. However, the underlying psychology — the human need for social conformity, the desire to be part of the 'in-crowd', deference to authority and an inclination towards hero-worship — is presumably as old as humanity itself. A fascinating recent social experiment indicates just how powerful such contextual factors are in shaping our likes and dislikes: a world-famous musician playing incognito at a metro station attracted hardly any attention at all! The idea that we are able to judge works of art, music, literature, cinema, etc. on their merits may be much closer to being a myth than we think...

[Update: Video of the visit; yours truly can be glimpsed 4:35–4:39, to the right of the balding gentleman holding up the camera.]