(FORTUNE Magazine) – Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing--The Marketing of Culture by John Seabrook (Alfred A. Knopf)

John Seabrook sees evidence all around of something he says is new: the flattening out of the old cultural system, where the lines between highbrow and lowbrow were clearly demarcated by a class of cultivated tastemakers. A new system, in which marketing and culture are equal, stands in its place; Seabrook calls it nobrow. To flesh this out, he has repackaged several pieces he wrote for The New Yorker--on George Lucas, David Geffen, MTV--and glued them together with critical theory, observations from his personal life, and musings on the buzzification of The New Yorker itself.

He is not exactly wrong about the state of things. But he has oversimplified how and when we got here. Consider jazz, or graffiti art, or the High and Low show at the Museum of Modern Art a decade ago. Or consider a passage in which Seabrook covets a $200 Helmut Lang T-shirt: He likes that it could make him "part of that whole hip-hop thing," but also that he'll remain "secretly above it all." In other words, what really seems remarkable as we slouch into the 21st century isn't that culture is so porous, but that hierarchies of taste are so resilient.

Seabrook has an entertaining aesthetic sense, but Nobrow ends up a mix of the obvious and the specious, and I doubt that it will enter the culture. It is, however, a clever marketing conceit. See the difference?

--ROB WALKER