Alistair Gentry

I was aware of Paris Syndrome but avoided mentioning it for reasons of brevity and clarity. I think the key difference is that PS (and related things like Jerusalem Syndrome) are travellers' disorders that result from innumerable factors or from nothing in particular, and so they're probably best described as acute or pathological forms of culture shock.

Stendhal may sometimes have some element of culture shock too, but a Parisian can experience Stendhal in the Louvre, or a Londoner in the National Gallery, because it's specifically a reaction to numerous images of people placed reverently on walls. Stendhal Syndrome (and figurative art) is actually messing around with the fundamental wiring of human perception and cognition in a way that goes deeper than having one's heart broken by the disappointing reality of a cherished ambition.

Your suggestion about celebrity artefacts is more interesting than a comment on a website can do justice to! Individual art works definitely are shrouded in a mystique and a reverence that is more irrational than ever in world where even the "priceless" Mona Lisa, for example, can be replicated perfectly to order by a hack painter in a workshop in Shenzhen. It's an open secret that many major art institutions either knowingly or unwittingly have fakes (i.e. works not by the purported artist) in their collections. See Orson Welles' 'F for Fake' for an interesting look at this concept. Nothing has changed in the art world's upper echelons since he made that film 30 years ago.

Both the modern museum and the commercial art world are founded on the irrational value placed on an authentic, unique and unrepeatable object that has some kind of official approval as THE object, superior to any other instance of that object, and superior to any reproduction of it (even one so perfect as to be indistinguishable from the original is not as valuable, taking us into Philip K Dick/Baudrillard/Borges territory). In some ways it's surprising that MORE people don't have wildly irrational responses to art, since the construction and maintenance of the concept of "art" itself is often so irrational.