Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture

Prepare to enter the outrageous new world of Nobrow, where the old cultural distinctions — highbrow (Wagner’s Ring), middlebrow (Masterpiece Theater), and lowbrow (the latest MTV video) — cease to exist. John Seabrook raises the curtain on an onrushing cultural phenomenon: the melding of culture with the marketing of culture and the culture of marketing. He shows us how Nobrow increasingly defines the great American audience that now follows the Three Tenors on tour, cheers rock groups like Radish (whose fifteen-year-old lead singer wins a multi-million-dollar recording contract and fifteen minutes of celebrity), obsesses on the prequel toStar Wars, and is as hip to promotion as to performance. He reveals how the Buzz came to Tina Brown’sNew Yorker; how art and business mingle in the work of moguls like George Lucas and David Geffen; how it’s all stirred together in one super-soup of art, money, spin, and hype; and how even aesthetic worth is measured by units shipped in the frenetic culture he calls (as we all will from now on) Nobrow.