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Here’s a reading assignment: two books, some big ideas. Neither one will
tell you what — or how — to think, but you will be spurred to think for
yourself while reading them.
The
first is John Seabrook’s Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing
of Culture (Random House, $35). John Seabrook only ever wanted to work
at The New Yorker. Once he got there, he found Tina Brown had altered
it irrevocably. He’d admired the magazine’s studious avoidance of the
ephemeral, the evanescent and the fleeting. But that had meant declining
readership numbers and a publication advertisers viewed as moribund and a
pointless buy. Brown hoped to reverse that by focusing on subjects making
noise — and money — further down in the market.
But
Seabrook didn’t walk out once Brown took over. He needed to pay for a SoHo
apartment, for one thing. And he needed, apparently, to pay way too much
money for Helmut Lang pants and ridiculously expensive T-shirts whose chief
charm is the fact they’re indistinguishable from T-shirts sold for pennies a
pound at Wal-Mart. Not that Seabrook was entirely comfortable with the
arrangement, of course. He really wanted to write long pieces about tuna
fishing. He got to write them, but Brown never published them. Instead, she
assigned him to execute the magazine’s end of a delicate exchange: the
prestige of a New Yorker profile for the borrowed “hotness” and buzz
of celebrities whose presence in the magazine would, it was hoped, boost its
circulation and ad rates. So Seabrook ended up writing deeply ambivalent
profiles of people like affectless, obscenely wealthy and exquisitely bored
mogul David Geffen, never-grew-up movie director George Lucas and
not-grown-up-yet rock stars like Ben Kweller.
That same ambivalence runs all the way through Nobrow, which aims to
look at how marketing and “culture,” (whatever that is anymore) melted into
each other and morphed into the ubiquitous lukewarm soup we all swim through
but remain vaguely dissatisfied with. Seabrook admits to bafflement as to
how the old high-low taste strictures went soft in the heat of
celebrity-worship klieg lights and devolved into nothing more than differing
brand preferences.
Some critics have taken swipes at the book for its discursive nature and its
shape-shifting: personal memoir to philosophical musing to recycled New
Yorker assignments to thinking out loud. But that’s what makes it an
interesting read; watching Seabrook think on the page is a lot more
entertaining than having somebody who doesn’t know the difference between
politics and ideology denounce you for drinking Starbucks coffee. Seabrook
tries out a couple of possible explanations for the collapse of the old
high-low cultural continuum (he may be overestimating its pervasiveness and
power when it was ascendant). But he avoids the main temptation in an
undertaking like this: prescriptive instructions on how to “fix” the current
situation.
If
you want to know how something could be fixed or improved, follow Seabrook’s
Nobrow with Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little
Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown, $34.95). Also a New
Yorker writer, Gladwell disproves a lot of Seabrook’s contentions about
Brown’s regime. She hired Gladwell, whose work seems the apotheosis of the
William Shawn-era New Yorker as limned by Seabrook: lucid, unadorned,
beautiful for its lack of filigree. And because of that, the depth and
quality of Gladwell’s plain old shoe-leather reporting shine more brightly.
Even when interpreting what he’s discovered, you never get the sense
Gladwell’s done selective reporting as a means to advance his own
prejudices, agenda, received opinion or blind-faith contentions.
Reading this book, I thought every ad agency in the country ought to buy a
copy for each of its employees, then test them after a week to make sure
they’d read it. In the old days as described by Seabrook, of course,
cultured folks would have heard about this book from similarly educated
members of their own class and read it in order to stay current. That
doesn’t happen anymore. And while Gladwell doesn’t directly address why, his
discoveries may offer some possible explanations for the cultural shift
Seabrook posits in his volume. |
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