There is a trend in book publishing -- not a new one, but a growing one -- of writers compiling previously published articles into books: real books, with themes and titles, not just collections of essays. There are a couple reasons for this double dipping. First, it's easy. You find a link, however tenuous, between a handful or more of your articles, and rewrite them just enough to make them adhere more closely to your theme. It's a breeze to find a publisher, because you're already a published writer. Second, it's more lucrative than just publishing a collection of essays, which don't sell very well. If you've never heard of John Seabrook, are you more likely to buy Articles of John Seabrook Pulled from the New Yorker, or the trendy sounding Nobrow: the culture of marketing -- the marketing of culture ?

I wouldn't have a problem with this trend if the resulting books were worthwhile efforts. This one disappointed me. Seabrook promised to talk about a new cultural paradigm and new ways that marketing and culture interact (or perhaps more accurately, the ways they've fused), but pretty much all he did was coin a new term, Nobrow, and slap it on everything under the sun.

The book jacket explains that Nobrow describes a territory where the old cultural distinctions of highbrow (Wagner's Ring), middlebrow (Masterpiece Theater), and lowbrow (MTV videos) cease to exist. Yet Seabrook spends a third of the book talking about MTV and how it is Nobrow. He spends another third talking about the New Yorker, which he labels middlebrow (when it sat on his parents' coffee table) and Nobrow (under the editorship of Tina Brown). I always thought it lay somewhere between middlebrow and highbrow (it's better than Masterpiece Theater, for God's sake, but not as good as Shakespeare), but what do I know? The problem with the category Nobrow is it's far too fluid to be of much use.

Seabrook says that Nobrow replaces the old aristocracy of taste with a new meritocracy of taste. The parameters of the new meritocracy are what's popular rather than what's "good." Marketing and culture merge, so that an MTV video (the artistic/cultural element) is really just a commercial for the album (the marketing element). George Lucas and his Skywalker Ranch and the hundreds of employees writing Star Wars books and creating Star Wars spin-off games and designing newfangled light sabers represent the union of art and commerce. And when there's no longer a distinction between art and commerce, or marketing and culture, the idea of "selling out" becomes meaningless.

This is an important idea, but I'm not sure it merits a new label. If you ask me, MTV and the Star Wars phenomenon are still lowbrow, and I still find all those old labels highly useful. I try to throw them around as much as possible.

Seabrook's writing style is very personal and anecdotal, which is good and bad. He writes amusingly about Tina Brown and David Geffen and a trip to Pottery Barn. His insider shop-talk about the New Yorker is juicy and revealing, at least for a magazine geek like me. But the academic geek in me wanted this book to have more theory and analysis, a firm skeleton on which to hang all those fleshy anecdotes.





Recommended: No