Chapter 9 describes the timescale of the emergence of artistic excellence and celebrity, which involves processes that may be shorter or longer than the artist’s life course, in this case the historical appreciation of the significance of a particular artist and work. The chapter first discusses the standard model of excellence from the behavioral sciences and explains why this model cannot account for the empirical data. The chapter discusses the emergence and distribution of excellence and celebrity, including artistic superstars, and shows how these processes illustrate fundamental features of complex systems such as asymmetric distributions, power laws, and self-similarity.