Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed
Review: Vintage Books has been somewhat dishonest in the marketing of the book. The description on the back of the book is quite different from the content inside. Rather than providing perspective on the "marketing of culture," Mr. Seabrook merely gripes about the politics of working at The New Yorker. I was very disappointed and found the narrative to be flat, even dull. At times, Mr. Seabrook's style is extremetly pompous, always self-absorbed.
Rating: 
Summary: Nails our new culture, for better or worse
Review: We all sense a radical change going on in the culture, I think, and it leaves most of us uneasy and confused. Old ways of judging and thinking about art, class and culture seem obsolete. But what, if anything, is replacing the old ways? Should we lament the passing of the venerable but elitist "high-brow, low-brow" distinctions? Or should we feel liberated? Is the ascendency of marketing and buzz leading us to cultural doom? Or are we somehow muddling forward to a new and ultimately richer, more democratic form of culture? To his credit, Seabrook doesn't deliver pat answers to questions like these. Who can know at this stage? What he does, brilliantly, is to parse the questions and dissect the culture in completely fresh and illuminating ways. The hardest thing to pull off in the midst of swirling change and chaos is to impose a bit of order, to see a few things clearly. This is hard work and Seabrook has done it well - and not just idly from his armchair but by venturing forth into the new world and embracing it and providing us with irreverent portraits of perplexing new avatars like David Geffen, George Lucas and the haunchos at MTV. The book is also very funny, as it ought to be given the material. There's a lot of Seabrook in the book, which is good because he's as honest and blunt about himself and his high-brow background and his New Yorker peers (especially Tina Brown) as he is about everything else. Like our new culture, the book swirls with energy and challenging ideas. You can't read it and view the world the same way afterwards. Bravo!
Rating: 
Summary: Culture as Commodity.
Review: Where the discriminating tastes of highbrow and the mass-market commercialism of lowbrow incestuously feed off each other is the space that author John Seabrook describes as "Nobrow", in his book of the same title. Seabrook observes that "in Nobrow commercial culture is a source of status, rather than the thing the elite define themselves against." Where culture was once a hegemonic "town house" of High-Low distinctions, we have gradually shifted over time to a new paradigm where these separations have been all but eradicated (the very mosaic "megastore"). Thus, the artwork of Star Wars is a featured exhibit at the Minneapolis Museum of Art, Helmet Lang produces clothing modeled after the styles of The Gap and Old Navy and then sells them for four times the price, and Rosanne is invited to host an editorial meeting at The New Yorker.
One of Seabrook's more compelling observations in "Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture" pertains to the origin of the word "culture" itself, which can be traced back to two European sources: "from the French word 'civilisation', which means the process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, and from the German word 'Kultur', which describes any characteristic way of life." It is a fitting way of looking at how our own definition of "culture" has shifted from "the notion that high culture constituted some sort of superior reality, and that the people who made it were superior beings... to the more anthropological, Levi-Straussian sense of culture: the characteristic practices of any group." And, more often than not, these "characteristic practices" are a product of the cultural marketing machine, the almighty creator of the Buzz. "Nobrow" demonstrates how we are shaped and molded by a select group of Tastemakers; those in the position of controlling the flow of both our financial and cultural capital. They are the Judy McGraths, the George Lucases and the David Geffens of our cultural landscape who manufacture taste rather than respond to it. But taste has also become dictated by the masses, and "cultural equities rise and fall in the stock market of popular opinion". It is why the decision-makers at MTV regularly turn to their twentysomething interns and assistants-their direct channel into the Buzz-for insight into the latest trends and then take those trends, repackage them, and feed them back to the mainstream in a perpetual cycle of codependence. In the end, Seabrook appears to be perfectly content living in the Nobrow. He finds it completely logical that a fourteen-year-old wunderkind from Greenville, Texas is valued more for his ability to look and act like Kurt Cobain than for his musical talents. That "The Lion King", by becoming a hit Broadway musical, has now entered the ranks of high art. That to many, "Star Wars" is not just a film, but a lifestyle. Culture has transcended the boundaries of taste to become the ultimate market commodity, and John Seabrook is more than happy to be a consumer.
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