A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
|
[What High Culture? What Low Culture?
AUTHOR ARGUES IT'S ALL THE SAME
By Julia Keller
Tribune Cultural Critic
March 14, 2000
If you hold the culture up to your ear like a seashell, what you hear is Buzz.
Buzz is the hip, humming, churning, burning, edgy, densely packed power of public desire. As an author who specializes in pop culture, John Seabrook knows all about Buzz. And a couple of years ago, he started noticing something funny: Buzz is no longer bifurcated.
The cultural divide between highbrow and lowbrow culture-between, say, Mozart and the World Wrestling Federation, between Shakespeare and Madonna, between escargot and a chili dog-is fading in favor of a single culture: Nobrow.
"Ultimately, a Picasso or an Elvis on black velvet are really the same thing," Seabrook said on a recent visit to Chicago. "They start from the same place."
Whoa, there. You're in Art Institute land here, fella, so watch yourself. The Picasso is obviously superior... isn't it? Well, isn't it?
To which Seabrook would reply, in a respectful but firm voice, "Says who?" Such demarcations are matters of opinion, not fact, and opinions increasingly are sliding into a mushy middle ground, out of which sprouts a bright green dollar sign.
Nobrow, he argues, is "the exact midpoint at which culture and marketing converged." The ancient line between high and low culture is gone, rubbed out by the scuff marks of a million stampeding feet on their way to buy something hot: music, theater, books, jeans, sneakers, latte. What a thing is seems to matter less than the fact that it is coveted by large numbers.
And the value of a thing is determined not by some smarty-pants critic with a Ph.D., but by whether or not it sells.
"The old cultural arbiters, whose job was to decide what was `good' in the sense of `valuable,' was being replaced by a new type of arbiter, whose skill was to define `good' in terms of `popular,'" writes Seabrook in "Nobrow: the Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture" (Knopf).
The book expands on a series of essays Seabrook published in the New Yorker, where he is a staff writer and where, he noted, the issue of high and low culture came into sharp relief with the hiring of Tina Brown as editor. Brown made the magazine more topical but, some complained, also destroyed its fabled literary traditions, like someone who yanks down the dark velvet drapes in the drawing room to install hot pink mini-blinds.
Seabrook's portrait of Brown as a boss - devastatingly candid, but never nasty - is one of the high points of the book, which includes other pivotal experiences in the author's encounters with all manner of culture. Instead of a dense, heavily footnoted treatise filled with sociological theorizing, "Nobrow" comes across as an afternoon stroll with a smart, funny friend.
He's a guy who has looked long and thought hard about culture, from hip-hip to Herodotus. The loss of that clear line of demarcation, those comfortable, predictable distinctions, is both good and bad, Seabrook said.
"I'm ambivalent about nobrow. It can be utopian and classless, or it can be a mindless, brainless place. I think I like it because it has both qualities."
Splitting culture right down the middle, like a melon at breakfast, made sense in America's early days, Seabrook said. We were a fresh new country, a bit nervous about how we measured up to European culture, which had a head start on us of many centuries. So we used culture as a kind of VIP pass, as a way of proving to ourselves and others that we, too, knew our way around an art gallery. We, too, could exhibit taste and refinement.
"We felt we had to create a high culture," Seabrook said. "To solidify your social position and to distinguish yourself from others, you cultivated a distaste for the cheap amusements and common spectacles that made up the mass culture."
In the late 20th Century, however, the power of the marketplace began to assert itself. The old cultural hierarchies began to crumble in the wake of the relentless, pounding beats of mega-selling music, blockbuster movies and bestselling books, many of which had promotional tie-ins to TV shows, videos, T-shirts and action figures. The marketplace stood up on its hind legs and brayed.
Many might mourn the old, stable categories of high and low - but not Seabrook.
"Today, the marketplace is richer than ever before. It's not just the big movies and trashy novels - it's that little Web site with a sound chip on it with music by that interesting Scottish band. The `low end' has gotten so much better that the reason for keeping it apart from the `high end' is gone now."
Still, Seabrook admitted occasionally he's sad to lose some aspects of the old high-low separation, such as the reverence afforded creativity. "It's no longer miraculous that something gets made - it's miraculous when it gets sold."
In his writing, he mixes the memoir and the argumentative essay, whipping up a nifty amalgam of opinion and fact. "My writing is a continual examination of myself," said Seabrook, 40, who looks every inch the protagonist of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, right down to the Princeton degree.
"You write out of a sense of loss. You're trying to recover a time in your childhood when you weren't at odds with the universe. When you write, you're going back there.
"Also," he said, a smile breaking across his lean face, "it's a lot of fun. I love learning new things. I love starting afresh. You're expanding your horizons all the time."
Seabrook and his wife, magazine editor Lisa Reed, are the parents of a 14-month-old son, Harry. They live in New York.
His previous book, "Deeper," an exploration of the Internet, did not sell especially well, Seabrook said.
"The market does have an integrity of sorts," Seabrook said. "I had been paid a fair amount to write it and I felt responsible when it didn't sell. I didn't blame the culture. I blamed myself.
"There's something egalitarian about the marketplace. What people like is not always wrong."
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|