Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

John Seabrook is the author of two books, "Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in
Cyberspace" (Simon and Schuster, 1997), and "Nobrow: The Culture of
Marketing, the Marketing of Culture" (Knopf, 2000). As a staff writer at
the New Yorker magazine since 1993, Seabrook has written on a wide variety
of topics, including pieces about the Internet -- "E-mail from Bill," "My
First Flame," and "Home on the Net" -- and on pop culture ( MTV, George
Lucas, and David Geffen, etc.). In the course of writing the later series
of pieces Seabrook developed his theory of Nobrow: how modern commercial
culture has changed the old hierarchy of high and low culture that has
endured for nearly a century in the U.S. His most recent New Yorker pieces
include "Sleeping with the Baby," concerning where babies should sleep
(parents bed or their own?), and "Selling the Weather" (in the April 3,
2000 issue), an essay about the Weather Channel and why it's so enjoyable
to watch weather on TV.

I'm Ron Hogan, and I'll be  your host for this discussion. I'm one of the
hosts of the inkwell.vue conference, and I also edit and publish an online
literary review called Beatrice.com.

By the way, you can hear John Seabrook reading from Nobrow online. Just
go to <http://www.mp3lit.com/nonfiction/seabrook.html>.
  

    

John, perhaps the first thing that we could discuss is that although in the
course of Nobrow you offer a personal look behind the scenes of the Tina
Brown New Yorker, this book is so much MORE than another New Yorker memoir.
What is this look at the magazine's inner workings a jumping point towards?
  

    
The Nu Yorker was xhibit A in my larger argument for Nobrow, the place
where culture and marketing converge. I had a front row seat at Brown's
New Yorker, and in fact I was a willing participant in it. As I saw it,
Brown's New Yorker was taking place within the context of a larger coming
together of the old elite culture and the new mass culture. Nobrow is very
much about this, on various levels. But at the heart of it I guess it's a
 memoir, and so the New Yorker is naturally a part of it. 
  

    

Hmmm.  I'm idly wondering how this relates to what David Talbot calls the
"smart tabloid" style.

That collision point between trashy and classy in news coverage is an
example of Nobrow, perhaps.
  

    

"at the heart of it I guess it's a memoir"

One of the things that appeals most to me about Nobrow, in fact, is that
rather than simply reprint several New Yorker articles from the last few
years, you've provided a personal context for how those articles came to
be written, one which also has a broader cultural reflection to it as well.

That's not really a question, I guess. I'll try to come up with one soon.
  

    
Maybe I missed the point, but as I read the book, I'm having trouble
understanding how "nobrow" differs from what Jean Shepherd used to call
"slob culture", which fits into a distinct place in the Highbrow-to-Lowbrow
continuum. The obsession with showbix celebrities in Tina's New Yorker, MTV
and Lucas' Star Wars mythos are all certainly examples of culture created
in the interest of commerce, but is that any different from, oh, Walteer
Winchell as an arbiter of taste?
  

    
My basic thesis is that taste has changed. That taste for some century or
so served in the US as birth served in Europe -- as something to build a
class system around. So there was elite or high taste, and there was low
or mass taste, and people who patronized each were highbrows and lowbrows
respectively.

The rise of our current mass culture, of which MTV and Star Wars and Tina
Brown's New Yorker are all examples, ended that old system, because what
was formely contained on the lower end rose and spread everywhere. So now
you have elite insisutions like the Minneapolis Insitute of Art putting on
the Star Wars exhbit, oon the theory that that's the only way to get the
youngsters into the museum, and once they are there perhaps theirt tases
will improve. 

There is still elite taste, obviously, but it is no longer universally
recognized as elite -- "subculture is the new high culture and high
culture is just another subculture" is a line from the book. In place of
that old system of taste, I would aruge, we have a system of brands. But
brands were all pretty lowbrow in the old taste system.
  

    
"When it comes to the arts, Gov. Jesse Ventura
        thinks Stone Cold and Mankind compare quite
        favorably with Shakespeare and Chekhov."

                --Saint Paul Pioneer Press writer
                in an article about Gov. Jesse Ventura
                arguing with students over arts funding.
                (The state legislature recently
                overrode a Ventura veto and
                gave $3 million to the Guthrie
                Theater.)
  

    
I really resonated with your thought that "taste is power"--the first
thing I thought of was kids playing loud music from cars. A lot of
money and time goes into making cars ever more loud--they even have
sound system "drag races" now, using dB meters instead of
stopwatches--all in order to reinforce the notion that MY TASTE RULES!
So, you're sitting in traffic listening to something pleasant at a
normal volume when suddenly a car goes by that is apparently filled
with percussion grenades going off at timed intervals. I will force you
to listen to my music because this makes me feel important and
powerful. All the better if you don't like it; I can feel smug and
superior, too.
  

    

The "spread everywhere" aspect is important, too. I should have checked
to see how much of the media imagery and sound in your opening segment
actually came from David Geffen, I guess...but it's plain that Geffen's
influence on our culture is enormous.
  

    

If you have questions for John Seabrook, post them here if you are on the
WELL, or e-mail them to inkwell-hosts@well.com if you are not on the
WELL...
  

    

Like John Dentino did! He writes:

"John, is it really news to you that an "oceanic" experience can be had on
the cheap, outside of "highbrow" museums and the literary canon? Come
on. I submit that America has been a nobrow culture for a long time now.

For those of us brought up in the middle class with a public school
education, pop culture has always offered us some degree of richness,
although more often than not the experience of pop-culture art is one of
immediate, emotional gratification rather than of "oceanic" depth.

John, when you are swept up in a Chemical Brothers show, keep in mind your
head is already filled with Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Brahms,
Blake, Goya, et al., from your education. Your mind is pre-loaded with the
best software Western Civilization has to offer. You're able to read a lot
into the music. Pop stuff isn't meaty enough on its own for people steeped
in high culture - not enough layers to it.

I'll wager your experience at the concert was likely an entirely different
one from the unschooled street kid next to you. You got symmetry, terror and
pity -- he achieved an erection.

Yes, when a good education was the province of the rich, the separation
between highbrow and lowbrow was at its height. The democratization of
education has blurred the line. Comparing computer-sequenced measures in the
Chemical Brothers with the structure of a 17th century sonnet is what the
university is all about now.

I haven't read your book, but it seems as if you think this democratization
is mostly a great thing.

I'm not so sure. I think it might be better to keep pop culture studies to
more of a minimum in an academic environment, because it's already pervasive
in students' lives . The smart ones are going to interpret and find great
popular works on their own. You can't stop them. Why do the academics and
the museums - the "elite" - have to prove they're hip? Running exhibitions
and teaching courses on current pop stuff seems largely a waste of time.

A student is saturated with pop. He is hungry for the old, the wise, the
proven. He'll then take the stuff of the classics and mix it with a
contemporary sensibility. He can do it on his own, naturally, without the
patronage of "art" schools and "cutting edge" curriculums."
  

    
I think I mostly agree. The whole book is less sanguine about pop cultue
than the part I read for the MP3 file (which I assume it what you listened
to). But I am also thinking of the Homer and Joyce and Eliot I studied in
college, not to mention the Arnold Tennyson, Beowulf, and Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight, and I'm wondering whether I wouldn't have been better
served spending that time on Miles Davis or Ornette Coleman, or Krazy Kat,
or Preston Sturges. When I was getting my high education (late 70's early
80's) there defintely was not much mix of the pop and the high. You say it
has changed, and perhaps it has in osme places, bt I doubt they're
studying much Chemical Brothers at Oxford. Certainly for my line of work,
an education that dealt with pop culture would have been more useful than
an education that pretended pop culture was mostly a passing fad. I'm not
suggesting term papers devoted to Beverly Hills 90210, but...well. you
know what I mean. 

Why not teach kids the Beatles, and then when they're adults they'll want
to read Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, rather than forcing them
to read Beowulf, when all they want to do is listen to the Beatles?
  

    

While I never had to write term papers on 90210, when I was in film school
(BA and MA) I did end up writing papers on Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, DC
comics origin stories, and Yahoo Serious. Oh, and we had to read
"Neuromancer" for class one time--three years after I'd read it in high
school. It was exciting, in a way, to have my taste for comic books and SF
"validated" like that.

Of course, the department was still bogged down in a bunch of Lacanian
and post-Lacanian theory, but what can ya do?
  

    

I'm just about finished with _nobrow_ and I'm wondering how "Outsider Art"
would be seen from a nobrow perspective.  It's a bit of an anomaly.  As I've
come to understand it, the term is a high-culture term used to define art
made by unschooled (often religiously-inspired) artists like Howard Finster
- who's best known (or widely known) for painting the cover of a Talking
Heads album.

Further, outsider artists are often referred to as "naiive" or "visionary"
which makes their talent seem on loan, rather than practiced or practical.
In a strange twist, these terms seem derogatory, and yet outsider art is a
part of highculture.  There are exhibits and galleries and collectors.

The interesting flip side is that many outsider artists embrace the idea
that art is for the people and to that end, the artist's role is to create
as many works as possible.  Plus, the pieces must be affordable.
Ultimately, these are lobrow artists validated by highbrow culture.  The
artists use highculture to "get their message out" while at the same time
releasing their work (cheaply) to whoever's interested.  The art exists in
both highbrow and lowbrow worlds.

This may have little to do with nobrow, but it somehow seems fitting.
  

    
well said.
  

    
Yes, indeed. Maybe I could copy and paste that into the paperback?

In Nobrow I was thinking more about mass culture or commercially produced
culture, not naive or outsider art. It seems to me that the phenomenon
you're describing above has existed at least since the Impressionists,
whose work was outside the Academy and deliberately naive and unpainterly
in the neoclassical sense. In our time we have graffiti artists like
Basquait and Haring and Scharff, and more recently you have people who are
not from street who deliberately affect a street style, like Tracy Emin. 

But I also think context is important here. As soon as the work is taken
off the street and placed in a gallery, it ceases to be lowbrow in the
sense that, say, the WWF is lowbrow. When you walk into that gallery
you're looking at it a totally different way than you'd look at it on a
subway wall. It becomes highbrow. In the same way that Warhol's work
derived from lowbrow sources but became highbrow. 

But this is different, isn't it, from, say, walking into Times Square at
night at being struck by the beauty of the Nasdaq sign. That is more what
I'd call Nobrow, because the work is not removed from its lowbrow context. 

But now my wife says she has to use this line...I'll put up more later.
  

    
I would say that at least some of the rise of the Nobrow phenom is
related to the ascendancy of a new wave of nouveau-riche. I don't mean
this only in the narrower sense of 90's "dot com" money, although the
size and attention lavished on this new upper-middle-class certainly
accelerates the trend. Rather, I would situate the rise of Nobrow (as I
understand it) with the general postwar economic elevation of all
Americans (1945-2000 and beyond), which has been interrupted by various
recessions, but which has served to create a more wealth than in any
other 50 year period I can think of. Access to books, free time,
college, and now the web has been made possible due to relief from the
pressing need for survival and subsistence, opening up "culture" to
millions who never would have experienced it in another century. This
opening has naturally expanded the previously more narrow definitions
of what taste and culture is, and created the subtle rills of feedback
in terms of guilt, snobbishness, nostalge-de-la-boie, and
"level-crossing" that have been the hallmarks of Nobrow.
  

    
> This
 opening has naturally expanded the previously more narrow definitions
 of what taste and culture is, and created the subtle rills of feedback
 in terms of guilt, snobbishness, nostalge-de-la-boie, and
 "level-crossing" that have been the hallmarks of Nobrow.

 I could use that too.

What I am trying to talk about in Nobrow is more about the way audiences
receive/culture, not the way artists make it. There has been a shift away
from respect for the elite, toward the popular, not in a highbrow way but
is a mainstream middleclass way. Instead of the authority of elites there
is the authority of the market. So, in fashion, Vogue is being  supplanted
by In Style as a bible of mass taste, because In Style is more populist.
In Style is not abot one style being in -- ie, fashion -- it is about many
diferent styles, which are made popular by celebrities.

Taste is the best one word description of this area, which is very
complicated and difficult to write about, because it's all around us and
mixed up in our way of seeing reality. 
  

    
Interesting. It almost seems that the old-line, white protestant
cultural elite has dismantled itself over the past 50 years through
some combination of self-loathing, idealism, curiosity about other
ideals, and guilt. Alot of the aesthetic paradigm-smashing that went
down in the 60's was not a cultural force emenating from outside the
elite, but was rather orchestrated by the elite itself, especially the
youngest members (rebellion as a symptom of generational wars/
demographics?). Ditto current artistic/cultural modes (eg, ivy-league
multiculturalists, etc). 
  

    

Hmm. John, have you read David Brooks' "Bobos in Paradise" yet? I haven't
had a chance to do more than glance at it, but from received reports it
seems like what he has to say about "bourgeois bohemians" might tie into
what you just said about the shifts in consumption/reception of culture.
I wish I could be more detailed than that...
  

    
How much of this is simply due to increased communication? More
pictures and more data from more sources has alerted people to the wide
variety of choices of things to have "Taste" about. And rather than
following the extremism of the '60s--where one wholly embraced, say,
being a hippie or moving to India--as you rejected the Taste of your
father, now we temper it with a little bit of this, a little bit of
that. We have an enormous number of ingredients to make our own recipe
of individualism.
  

    
Slippage. I have a review of Bobos in Paradise right here, and it
really sounds great. There's a line here about shopping in an upscale
supermarket (I imagine like Whole Foods) that "has taken the ethos of
California in the 1960s and selectively updated it. Gone are '60s-era
things that were fun and of interest to teenagers, like free love, and
retained are all the things that might be of interest to middle-aged
hypochondriacs, like whole grains."
  

    

A weird thought.  I am remembering a college paper I wrote for a UC Berkeley
undergrad course in cultural geography, many moons ago.

I had to take some innovation and chart how it spread geographically at two
historic points in time.  You would laugh if you saw how I dressed then -- or
now -- since I am no plumage wiz, and don't care all that much, but I chose
fashion as the innovation.

There is some docuemtation of styles arriving from the continent by sea in
the 19th century on the east coast, then being copied and slowly
diseminated towards the hinterlands (geographers liked the hinterland
concept it seemed) by drawings in newspapers, and imitation of the clothes
of upper class travelers by small town seamstresses.   The folks on the
frontier WERE hicks, and you know if they came to town because they wore a
strange kind of rumor-relayed knock-off of last year's cool clothes.

In the first part of the twentieth century it just got faster, and the
more affluent in remote places were more able to keep up.  But something
revolutionary happened in London in the mid-sixties.  Designers started to
look to the streets for style, and Carnaby street shops turned the class
influence relationship on its head.  Paris was soon imitating working class
London women who defined urban style on the cheap, who hemmed their own
skirits shorter and shorter, and who prepared the fashion world for a
strange adoption, morphing and co-option of various aspects of hippie
garb.  Though of course if you were part of the subculture, the fringed
beaded models in the magazine photos looked like they were from some  
virtual hinterlands of wanna-bes.

I post this mainly because it was so unlikely that I stumbled accross a
reason to read about fashion dissemination history that I presume few
others have.  It may have been part of the same "brow" shifting of the 
late 20th century.  Fashion and decoration relates to music culture, but
runs its own course.  Like I said, a weird tangential memory.   
  

    
The "get it in the streets" phenom you mention above is a hallmark of
the late 20th century, and a big part of the nobrow ethos. It is
interesting to note that it has happened elsewhere and elsewhen. There
were young Regency period London aristocrats called "rakehells," with
their fashions adopted from coachmen's cloaks, who indulged in a form
of street-violence they crudely associated with caracatures of lower
class life. There are tales of fabulously wealthy Ch'ing dynasty
Chinese aristiocrats being bourne to sumptuous banquets dressed in rags
and smeared with filth as per the dressing down aesthetic of the day.
There is my favortite- a spoiled M. Antoinette who had master craftsmen
build her a faux milk-maid's cottage (she chastised them for not
making the worm-holes in the wooden beams look authentic) so she could
play at being poor. Apparently this urge exists and surfaces in
humanity from time to time. 
  

    
However, the Marie Antoinette example, at least, is distinctly different
because Marie would have never gone slumming to the barn.  That was part of
the shift.  It was not simply a desire to shock, but ultimately a need 
to pass.