For more than a century, the elite in the United States distinguished
itself from consumers of popular, or mass, culture. Highbrow vs. lowbrow was
the language through which culture was translated into status – the pivot upon
which distinctions of taste became distinctions of caste. Then the old
distinction between the elite culture of the aristocrats and the commercial
culture of the mass public was torn down, and in its place was erected a
hierarchy of hotness. Nobrow is not culture without a hierarchy, but in Nobrow
commercial culture is a potential source of status, rather than the thing that
the elite defines itself against. John Seabrook
The opposition between high and low culture, good and bad taste, can no longer
be applied to contemporary culture. Cultural production today is governed by
the same marketing criteria of fashion and commercial worth that are applied to
commodities ranging from cars to clothing and interior design. The traditional
hierarchical relationship between high (elite) and low (mass) culture has been
replaced by a common, horizontal field of the ‘nobrow’.
In his book, Seabrook identifies the new cultural landscape of the ‘nobrow’. In
his terms, society today is dominated by MTV music culture, George Lucas and
Star Wars, the media – in particular The New Yorker – Kurt Cobain and
Snoop Dog, where what is ‘good’ means popular.
John Seabrook will be present at the official launch of the Russian
edition of Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture on 10
June 2012, as part of the 7th Moscow Open International Book Festival at the
Central House of the Artist.
John Seabrook
John Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993. He is the
author of Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace (Simon & Schuster,
1997), Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (Knopf, 2000)
and Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention (St. Martin’s, 2008).
His work has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Vogue,
Travel+Leisure and The Village Voice. Seabrook has taught non-fiction writing
at Princeton University. He lives in New York City.
