Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing + The Marketing of Culture (Vintage): Amazon.de: John Seabrook: Englische Bücher

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John Seabrook, The New Yorker's "Buzz Studies" writer, deftly conveys the hubbub of modern pop culture, the blending of highbrow and lowbrow tastes, into a new sensibility he dubs "Nobrow." In Nobrowland, nobody can sell out, because art and commerce have fused like colliding electrons. America used to be split between "stark intellectuality and the plane of stark business," but now, as Puff Daddy observes, "It's all about the Benjamins [$100 bills]." It's not just that an Oxford-bred guy like Seabrook is a connoisseur of Biggie Smalls, it's that everyone, high and low, wants to feel part of the Buzz, to soak up the power of celebrity success. Puffy's rap hit constitutes "merchandising, advertising, salary-boasting, and art all at once," says Seabrook. Nowadays, "commercial culture has to do the work that both high and folk culture used to do--not only enlighten and teach but bond families and communities."

Nobrow is itself a work of Nobrow art, shape-shifting like a Beck tune: it's art appreciation, memoir, social history, high-altitude academic theory, and shoe-leather reporting all at once. Seabrook captures world-historical figures in action: George Lucas, MTV's Judy McGrath, music exec Danny "Nirvana" Goldberg, and kabillionaire David Geffen, who helped bring you Tom Cruise and DreamWorks. The big book on Geffen may be The Operator, but Seabrook can nail him in a phrase: "The boredom in his eyes, which seemed on the verge of spilling over into other parts of his face, was held in check by his lively eyebrows." And no one has outdone Seabrook's jaunty account of his elite magazine's Nobrowification by Tina Brown, who established "a hierarchy of hotness."

Seabrook doesn't score on every shot, but it's fun to watch him play. He's like a kid brother to his cult idol, George W.S. Trow, author of the prescient 1978 classic Within the Context of No Context. If Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker's famous monocled snob icon, got zonked on "chronic bubonic" pot and gangsta rap, he might have written this dizzy yet erudite book. Indeed, one might not be altogether amiss in calling it "da bomb." --Tim Appelo -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

From Kirkus Reviews

A New Yorker staffer explores the convergence of highbrow and lowbrownobrowas salesmanship replaces worth. As a prime offender, he cites The New Yorker in its Brownian-Newhousian incarnation. The days when taste denoted power and power embodied taste were disappearing even as Russell Lynes wrote The Tastemakers years ago. Now what rules is buzz. The new buccaneers of buzz, the commercial arbiters of what tomorrow's fashion must be, are in charge, says Seabrook (Deeper, 1997). Kicking off in quasi-gonzo mode, he soon settles into more traditional reportage. There is even a riff on the old-school haberdashery of his dandy father, hauled out in contrast with the current style of his own expensive T-shirts, which are inscribed with advertising or made not to be laundered. Seabrook takes us along to pay tribute to a 15-year-old quondam rock star and immerses us in the blare and hustle of MTV. We tour the hip emporia of SoHo, check in with the ineffable David Geffen, and visit Star Warsnot the film but the marketing industry, including the elusive George Lucas himself. Content is commotion, melody is cacophony, ephemera is all, and teenage funk rules, man. It's phat, it's fly, it's trash. Seabrook, a thoughtful Ivy Leaguer who recently turned 39, is high on hip-hop. He's a fan of rap and such enigmatic entities as Rage Against the Machine and Dr. Dre. He sees former boss Tina Brown as Madame de Pompadour in a product-placement society in which the artists formerly known as Mozart and Shakespeare are replaced from top to deep, deep bottom by talentless ``performance artists'' and gangsta rap. A lively ethnology of a strange society that is devoid of culture in any classical sense, one whose wayward press enthusiastically celebrates what looks more and more like a mosh pit. It's a report from a cultural black hole. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verf�gbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

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Interesting Thesis Could Use More Detail 2. Juni 2000

Von Allen Smalling

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

In his peregrinations for the New Yorker magazine, author John Seabrook noticed a curious thing. The old cultural elite's distinction of high, middle and low culture seems to have broken down. (Example: classical music is somehow "better" than jazz, jazz better than rock, rock better than hip-hop, etc.) Instead, opines Seabrook, we live in an age of "Nobrow," in which cultural consumers and cultural providers read each other's needs so acutely that it is marketing that drives the culture and in turn, culture drives the marketing. In other words, the hegemony that cultural critics enjoyed in deciding what was art and wasn't (defining hegemony as "taste as power pretending to be common sense" [p. 53]) has pretty much been blown away.

What do we have now? We have Nobrow. People who pick and choose from all kinds of options without worrying too much whether it used to be considered trashy, egghead, mainsteam, avant-garde, cutting-edge, or declasse. We have saturation of the culture by media to the extent that culture and media--particularly televised media--become synonymous: "MTV has produced a new audience for whom the distinction betwen the market and culture was almost nonexistent." (p. 94)

Since the old distinctions are all but gone, the old venues have changed, too. You don't have to visit a museum to see museum pieces any more. "In Nobrow, paintings by van Gogh and Monet are the headliners at the Bellagio Hotel while the Cirque du Soleil borrows freely from performance art in creating the Las Vegan spectacle inside." (p. 162).

For Seabrook, the consummate example of this culture-marketing-culture interplay is George Lucas: "You could see Lucas as the first . . . appropriator of world culture, which he sold back to the world as Star Wars. Or you would see Lucas as an early sampler, a groundbreaker in which would become the essential Nobrow esthetic: making art out of pop culture." (p. 145).

All of this is interesting, even provocative. Occasionally I felt the journalism overexplained the thesis or was irrelevant to it (especially in the chapter on MTV); many if not most of this material originally appeared in the New Yorker and the magazine origin occasionally shows through. For the sake of good sportsmanship if nothing else, Seabrook should really have dealt with one of the bastions of high culture--a museum or symphony orchestra--to see how they are dealing with the new, allegedly classless, era of cultural distinctions. But he definitely has given me a new yardstick to measure things by. And I finally figured out why The Simpsons is my favorite TV show; it's so Nobrow in its mix of cultural references, everything from flatulence jokes to Eudora Welty and Steven Hawking.

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Lite Theory 6. Juli 2000

Von GM Rieker

If you're an academic used to rigorous scholarship, Nobrow will not satisfy you. (RE: NO FOOTNOTES) But it's a quick, interesting read for a general readership not familiar with cultural studies or Raymond Williams. Nobrow is anecdotal, the prose is pleasurable, and the stories about Tina Brown are entertaining. I only underlined a few sentences--mostly because the phrasing rather than the sentiment was outstanding.

General Readers: Recommended

Academic Readers: Skim in the stacks.

Nobrow - No Thesis, No Analysis, No Coherence 30. Mai 2000

Von Good Bye

Mr. Seabrook's book Nobrow: the Culture of Marketing and the Marketing of Culture, much like Mr. Vidal's Live from Golgotha, begins with a wonderful idea whose author is unable to bring to fruition. Such a title is pregnant with possibilities. One would expect a furtherance of the thesis of Culture, Inc., Mr. Herbert Schiller's excellent but relatively unknown book from the 1980s. Sadly, Nobrow is no such furtherance. It does not even further its own thesis. Furthermore, it does not even seem to have a thesis.

The book itself is infuriating. So intriguing is the title and its implied thesis that one continues reading hoping it will improve, that all the meaningless forays into whom Mr. Seabrook knows and what type of music he finds appealing will end and be replaced by trenchant analysis of a very serious problem, the decay of our culture into a heap of compost through the neglect and cynicism of American marketing firms. It never does. It simply rambles on aimlessly. The few pithy observations and histories of decline are spread too thinly to be of comfort. Even more disturbing is Mr. Seabrook's seeming disinterest in this decline. He seemingly accepts without regret that he himself is a Nobrow, neither terribly interested in traditional high culture nor regretful of its displacement by decadence and triviality.

If the book was said to have any argument at all to put forward, it would be that to be it is very "cool" to be "in the know" or "buzz" (Mr. Seabrook's word) of the world of popular culture. There is no history of the development of Nobrow culture, nor is there any analysis of its effects. There are only disconnected recollections, observations, and a few histories, but nothing ties them together into any coherent thesis. The decline of the New Yorker from a magazine of quality to something less serious than Vanity Fair is a potential cornerstone for a devastating indictment of Nobrow culture, but the indictment is never handed down. The entire reaction to the rise of Nobrow culture seems to be taken in stride with the penultimate dictum of our times, "well, whatever...never mind."

The sting of being enticed to purchase the book by the glorious promise of a well wrought argument concerning the decline of our culture and to discover it to be nothing more than tedious, gossipy trivia is very aggravating. Furthermore, the disconnectedness of the entire book brings to mind Neil Postman's observations that the students he has met in his classes over the past ten years seem not to understand the idea of cause and effect in their writing. Mr. Seabrook suffers from this problem. If one chapter connects to another to further the thesis (if one could be found) of the book, it is seemingly unintentional.

Give this book a pass. Go and obtain a copy of Culture, Inc. by Herbert Schiller or One Nation, Two Cultures by Gertrude Himmelfarb. What you sought in Nobrow will be found in these books.