Where the unique, non-standardized, and perfected are being promoted as cultural ideals, admiration comes to the fore: both as a captivating and at the same time problematic (because potentially hierarchizing) social emotion and attitude. The conference explores the practices, forms, and techniques of the generation of admiration and its aesthetic, social and political implications – in historical perspective as well as in regard to current phenomena. Against this background, we seek to investigate not only the narrative, performative, and media strategies of an admirable staging of the self, but also the social dynamics of a ‘shared admiration’.