Nobrow
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- "Both high and low culture have produced masterpieces and works of mediocrity. It is our task to find beauty in unexpected places."
- In music: "The "postmodern" 1960s were by no means the first period in which the boundaries between popular music and high culture had been seriously challenged. Rock was not the first popular music to cross the divide between high and low. We need only recall the Jazz Age of the 1920s when the avant-gardes of Paris and Berlin were enthusiastically consuming jazz and attempting to assimilate its aesthetic into their own practices." --Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club (2002) - Bernard Gendron, page 2
- In literature and the visual arts: "The notion of one art for the 'cultural,' i.e., the favored few in any given society and of another subart for the 'uncultered,' i.e., an excluded majority as deficient in Gutenberg skills as they are untutored in 'taste,' in fact represents the last survival in mass industrial societies (capitalist, socialist, communist - it makes no difference in this regard) of an invidious distinction proper only to a class-structured community. Precisely because it carries on, as it has carried on ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, a war against that anachronistic survival, Pop Art is, whatever its overt politics, subversive: a threat to all hierarchies insofar as it is hostile to order and ordering in its own realm. What the final intrusion of Pop into the citadels of High Art provides, therefore, for the critic is the exhilarating new possibility of making judgments about the 'goodness' and 'badness' of art quite separated from distinctions between 'high' and 'low' with their concealed class bias." --Fiedler, 1971
- "Focused on genres: "The discussion of high and popular culture does not suppose that individuals possess knowledge of particular cultural objects, but only some knowledge of a hierarchy of genres. I have argued that one of the most widely shared elements of modern culture consists in the awareness of which kinds of cultural objects are highbrow and which are popular. Therefore, the most important questions of cultural mediation center around differences between highbrow and popular genres." --Fringe and Fortune (1996) - Wesley Monroe, Jr., page 73
- Concepts in flux: "Although theater is now a highbrow form, this was not so until the nineteenth century." --Fringe and Fortune (1996) - Wesley Monroe, Jr., page 73
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Definition
The term nobrow is a postmodern neologism derived from highbrow and lowbrow. The term denotes intellectual discourse which is influenced both by high culture and low culture as initiated by Critical Theory in the United States and Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom, both of which were influenced by the French Annales School.
Critical and commercial success
The term can also be applied to cultural products which are both a critical and box office success
Where "body genres" intersect with "mind genres"
The term can also be applied to whenever "body genres" intersect with intellectual discourse.
Etymology
The term nobrow is a postmodern neologism derived from highbrow and lowbrow coined by John Seabrook in Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (2000). Highbrow denotes a "person of superior intellect and taste," first attested in 1902. Lowbrow is a "person who is not intellectual" is also first attested 1902, said to have been coined by humorist Will Irwin. (source: Etymology online).
Nobrow filmmakers and films
Directors
Roger Corman and Alain Robbe-Grillet includes high and low art tropes in his work.
Jess Franco is an exploitation director who appropriates literary classics.
Hour of the Wolf is a nobrow film because it deals with the body genre horror but is filmed by the intellectual filmmaker par excellence, Ingmar Bergman.
Events
Exploitation film presenter Kroger Babb purchased the American rights to Summer with Monika in 1956. To increase excitement for the film, he edited it down to sixty-two minutes and emphasized the film's nudity. Renaming the film Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl and connoting it to the bad girl movies tradition, he provided a good deal of suggestive promotional material, including postcards featuring the nude Andersson.
Film journals
Nobrow television
The Simpsons' referential smorgasbord.
Nobrow actors
Klaus Kinski working both with Jess Franco in the exploitation realm and with Werner Herzog in the high art realm.
Nobrow theory
- Postmodernism
- "Pop in the broadest sense was the context in which a notion of the postmodern first took shape, and from the beginning until today, the most significant trends within postmodernism have challenged modernism's relentless hostility to mass culture." -- After the Great Divide (1986) - Andreas Huyssen
- Camille Paglia: is firmly rooted in popular culture and links with literary theory
- Slavoj Žižek: uses popular culture to explain Lacan
- Peter Sloterdijk: uses the arse to explain an embodied philosophyin Critique of Cynical Reason
- Cross the Border — Close the Gap by Leslie Fiedler
- The Pornographic Imagination by Susan Sontag
Nobrow publishers
Eric Losfeld published high art (mainly surrealism) and low art cultural artifacts such as comic books, erotic books, etcetera.
Nobrow theatre
- Royal de luxe, European street theatre company
Related terms
culture war - cultural pessimism - eclecticism - elite - hierarchy - high culture - low culture - mass - paracinema - paraliterature - postmodernism - good taste and bad taste
See also
