A Week In Books: Welcome to Camp Kylie

Robert Altman's glorious Gosford Park includes a scene in which the suave songwriter Ivor Novello plays for country-house guests while the servants gather, entranced, by the door. This jewel of a sequence works as a miniature allegory of change. The glamour of aristocracy, already debased by dependence on industrial loot, melts away as modern celebrity begins to work its fatal charms.

That new fame rested on the fabrication of a mask, polished by the performer and endorsed by the fans. The historical "Ivor Novello" (a Welshman, born David Davies) flourished as the nation's sweetheart and troubadour while standing at the centre of a gay circle that linked showbiz to high society. In interwar Britain, Novello and his discreet friends had to worry about the law, but not the media.

How much progress have we made? Surveying the sadistic prurience, the hideous sexual McCarthyism, on show in the recent celeb-hunting season, the answer would seem to be none. British mass culture has gone more than slightly berserk in its confusion of mask and face, public and private life, and in its reckless urge to degrade last year's adulated idol into this year's blood sacrifice. And (for all the censure of "tabloid values"), it has been book publishers and literary agents who have acted as chief procurers, parlaying ghosted memoirs into six-figure press extracts with the help of "killer facts". The autumn that began, almost comically, with Roy Keane's studs and Edwina Currie's stud has just hit rock bottom with the flailing misery of Cheryl Barrymore's testament.

We can't abolish modern fame, or undo the star system that spreads outwards from Hollywood to conquer every corner of "high" and popular culture. What might be thinkable is an escape from the cycle of devotion and degradation that infantilises stars and fans alike. A new book by journalist David Gritten asks many of the right questions, even if he can't resolve them all. Fame: stripping celebrity bare (Allen Lane, £14.99) shrewdly recounts the ways in which becoming public property can "distort, disorient, and on occasions even destroy" its victims. Staggering penitently out of the limelight, Gritten reports, with a degree of understatement, that stars "seem as a group less well-adjusted and more ill-at-ease than the norm".

The trouble is that his polemic against stardom stems entirely from privileged access to it. This work would never have reached hard covers without chunks of disenchanting interview with Paul McCartney, Liam Neeson, Madonna, Steven Spielberg, et al. Gritten remains in thrall to the addiction he attacks, in a kind of AA, 12-step flight from "the tyranny of celebrity". What he rejects still defines him.

The alternative might be to stay inside the whole silly circus but take it with a bucketful of salt, enjoying fantasy free of delusion. For that brand of ironic fame, look no further than Kylie La La La (Hodder & Stoughton, £20): the deliriously over-designed new photo album with a text by Kylie's style guru, William Baker. A few years back, the idea of recommending the protean Antipodean moppet as an antidote to celebrity madness would have sounded bizarre. Yet not only do La Minogue and Mr Baker know exactly what they're doing, segueing from one look to the next – space queen to dominatrix, beach slut to pocket vamp. They expect fans to share the jokes, to giggle rather than worship. "Welcome to Camp Kylie" runs the message on a postcard here. Never was a truer word spoken. Kylie bares almost every centimetre of flesh, and not a millimetre of soul. Those gold hot pants form the perfect mask. "Most people are only privy to a two-dimensional version of me," she admits. And that's just the way we ought to like it.