Book Reviews

Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing - The Marketing of Culture
by John Seabrook
Published by Methuen 2000 (UK), Knopf 2000 (US)
ISBN 0 413 74470 1 (UK), 0 37540 504 6 (US)

Those of you who regularly read The New Yorker - as opposed to those who routinely buy it, then toss it on the coffee table to collect dust alongside the back issues of National Geographic - will be familiar already with John Seabrook's writing. He joined the magazine while it was under the editorship of Robert Gottlieb and suffering losses at a rate of $12 million a year. The magazine's glory days, when it was regarded as the cultural bible for a certain strata of society had long since past, and it was struggling to keep hold of its readership in an increasingly competitive and fragmented marketplace.

Enter Tina Brown and the concept at the heart of Seabrook's book. Brown, previously the grand dame of Vanity Fair, was brought in by Condé Nast owner Si Newhouse to turn the magazine around. Her arrival, Seabrook argues, reflected a larger change in American society, the end of a particular kind of cultural life and the beginning of another. "The old aristocracy of high culture was dying," writes Seabrook, "and a new, more democratic but also more commercial elite was being born-a meritocracy of taste."

Welcome to Nobrow, where marketing and culture converge, where "buzz" is the new mantra, and the old distinctions of what represents "quality" no longer apply, where "...good equals hot, excellent means entertaining, and celebrity defines quality. It's a world where the product may be trash but the marketing can be art and no-one, not even the people who created both, can really tell the difference."

Seabrook supports his thesis by taking the reader on an autobiographical road trip through America's recent cultural past, stopping along the way to take in the views offered by, among others, MTV, the Star Wars phenomenon and his own local neighborhood, SoHo (in New York, that is). It is a journey that is by turns entertaining and frightening. More choice, that's got to be good, right? And what about the Internet? Access to culture has never been easier. Of course in the world of Nobrow, culture can mean anything.

He ends the book back where he started, at The New Yorker, now sandwiched between Condé Nast's other titles in plush new offices in the heart of Times Square, a little of the magazine's independence sacrificed for the sake of survival. And Tina Brown has moved on to Talk, the offspring of her ultra-Nobrow marriage to Miramax and Tinstletown, where magazine begets movie, and movie begets merchandise. A match made in heaven? Time will tell.

As it happens, Seabrook is not the only one to have journeyed down the road to Nobrow in search of its origins. At the start of the recent, month-long Internet debate on arts and audiences, funded by the Arts Council of England François Matarasso tabled "Whistling in the Dark," a paper based on a startlingly similar premise. [The "Arts and Audience Debate" was managed by Britain's Arts Marketing Association in collaboration with the Theatrical Management Association, the Independent Theatre Council and the Association of British Orchestras. It was funded by the Arts Council of England and sponsored by Tickets.Com. A summary of the debate is available on the Arts and Audience Website www.artsandaudiences.com.]

In it Matarasso writes, "The combination of egalitarian philosophy, good free education, the mass media and extensive access to culture has made us a much more difficult lot to manage. Now we question the rules. We want to know why it's better to be bored by Schubert's Lieder than be moved by REM." He, like Seabrook, believes that we are witnessing "the birth of a cultural democracy in which the arts become one of the principal arenas in which society's competing interests negotiate their common and relative values."

His warning to those of us working in this ever-widening world of art and culture, particularly those who have come to expect and rely on a certain level of subsidy to realize their goals, is clear. We need to engage the public in a dialogue based on openness and respect. It's no good us wagging our fingers and telling people what's good for them anymore. They'll just tune us out and turn on to something else, leaving us talking to ourselves.

He goes on to stress that such communication also depends on the arts profession addressing the issues that most concern those living and working outside it. Instead of assuming what people want, we should be asking them. True, they may not know, but odds are they can tell us what they don't want. And isn't it better that they tell us, rather than show us by taking their custom elsewhere or withholding it altogether?

But before the accusations of 'dumbing-down' start, let's remember that it's a dialogue we're after. That means we need to know when and how to listen, but also when and how to speak. Yes, the arts must continue to push the cultural envelope, to present the new, the challenging and the different, but not from atop their ivory tower.

That way more people, not less, will be proud to say: 'Opera, ballet, theater-been there, done that, got the T-shirt.'

Kelly Gerrard
kgerrard@aeaconsulting.com

AEA Consulting LLC 

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Volume Two
Number 1 - Number 2 - Number 3

Volume One
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