One video from Gianluigi Donnarumma’s wedding in Locorotondo shows Erling Haaland leading a Viking row, arms pumping, mouth wide, the gesture now inseparable from Norway’s World Cup run 2. It is a moment of genuine celebration, yet within hours it is repackaged as viral content, stripped of context, replayed for clicks. Meanwhile, in S’Agaró, Susanna Griso married Luis Enríquez at Hotel La Gavina with 200–250 guests and a deliberately “relaxed atmosphere” 1. Two weddings, two different registers of public visibility. Both, however, belong to the same economy: the labour of being seen.
The media built Haaland’s row into a symbol of spontaneous authenticity—the footballer unguarded, joyful. But authenticity, in celebrity culture, is itself a performance. It requires a camera, an audience, and a tacit agreement that the private self will be offered for public consumption. Griso’s wedding, by contrast, was planned with an eye toward intimacy, but also toward coverage: the venue, guest count, and “personal touches” were reported as newsworthy 1. The difference between the two events is not one of authenticity versus artifice, but of control. Haaland’s row was a leak; Griso’s ceremony was a release.
This brings us to Tom Holland, who has vowed to perform all of Fred Astaire’s dancing himself in the upcoming biopic, without a stunt double 3. The announcement reads as a pledge of labour: the actor’s body will endure the training, the repetition, the risk. In an era of digital replacements, Holland insists on visible, physical work. But why is that insistence newsworthy? Because it signals a moral economy of celebrity: the star who earns his performance is more worthy of our admiration than one who delegates. Yet that same labour, when performed at a wedding (Haaland’s row), is often dismissed as just “having fun.”
Paddy McNally, the F1 magnate who died at 88, represents a different kind of unseen labour: the architect of hospitality in a sport built on speed and spectacle 4. He turned sponsorships into experiences, creating the very environment where celebrities (and former duchesses, in his case) could perform their lives.
The easy judgment is to mock the wedding industrial complex or to lionise Holland’s work ethic. But the unresolved question is subtler: when every private gesture can become public labour—a row, a vow, a dance—what do we owe the people who supply our entertainment? The audience consumes authenticity and then demands more. The tradeoff is that we never stop watching, and they never stop working.