Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing + The Marketing of Culture (Vintage) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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.

General Readers: Recommended

Academic Readers: Skim in the stacks.

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.