Q: What is Nobrow?

A: Nobrow is my word for the end of the old cultural categories of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" culture. High and low have been absorbed by a new, supercharged pop culture. In this world I'm calling Nobrow, pop culture serves the purpose of both the old high and low culture. You can have refined highbrow pop conversations about indie rock, with references to bands like Pavement and Black Flag, or you can can go crazy for Britney Spears. The book is my attempt to describe this new landscape.

Q: In the book you talk about "Nobrow moments." What are those?

A: Nobrow moments are glimpses of the new order, which is not like the old hierarchy of high and low, although there is a hierarchy of sorts. Dizziness, abrupt shifts in aesthetic perspective, and sudden loss of status are common symptoms.

Here is a Nobrow moment from the book:

One day, Steven Spielberg came to the New Yorker office. I happened to be up on 17, where our leader Tina Brown and her editors worked, "the killing floor" as one editor referred to it, when I looked up and saw Spielberg and Tina, looking fetching in one of her cream-colored suits, sweep past. She and a small crowd, me included, drifted down toward the area outside her office, where Tina tried in her charmingly inept way to engage Spielberg in small talk. Was there anything at the New Yorker that the maitre wished to see? Spielberg, who seemed like an earnest middlebrow in the old New Yorker mode, admitted that he would love to see the famous library, which was down on 16--a musty but sacred spot to anyone who cherished the old New Yorker and what it stood for. "The library!" exclaimed Tina. "Wonderful!" Then, turning to an aide, she was heard to whisper, "Where's the library?"

Anyone can have a Nobrow moment. You can have them in museums, for example, where must-see blockbusters have replaced the old, quieter exhibitions, a practice defended in the New York Times by Ben Hartley, the Guggenheims' director of communication, who said, "We are in the entertainment business and competing against other forms of entertainment out there." Conversely, in what used to be lowbrow venues you now find high art. Paintings by van Gogh and Monet are the headliners at the Bellagio Hotel, in Las Vegas, while the Cirque de Soliel borrows freely from performance art in creating the spectacle inside.

Since finishing the book, I have found myself having Nobrow moments with greater frequency. The greatest of all (so far) was the Millenium Celebration in Times Square (the place my story begins and ends). The Russians gather in front of St. Basil Cathedral, symbol of the power of faith. The Parisians gather at the Eiffel Tower, symbol of the power of industry and machinery.

And the Americans--and, via television, the world--gather in the new Times Square, symbol of the power of advertizing. The Nobrow century is at hand.

Q: Do you recall where you were, who you were talking to, or what you were thinking about when the word Nobrow first popped into your mind?

A: I thought of the word Nobrow in Tacoma Park, Maryland, at my brother-in-law's house. I'd just finished reading a book called Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America by James Twitchell. It was another in a series of books I had been reading about pop culture, all of which were eloquent in describing its trashiness, but missed its power and social importance. The author was an older man, and he seemed to be talking about pop culture as "mass culture," i.e., someone else's culture, something external to his identity. I was young enough to view pop culture as internal to my identity--i.e., pop culture is my folk culture, something that bonds me to my community and friends. This is the great generation gap of our time, the Mason-Dixon line that the Culture Wars get fought over.

Anyway, I was saying this to my wife as we were unpacking our stuff for the weekend. I said, "It's not highbrow, it's not lowbrow--it's Nobrow!" Later I discovered Robert Frost had used the word "Nobrow" in a speech he gave in the Sixties.

Q: The word "Buzz" has become very popular when talking about what makes certain people/places/things hot. How would you actually define "Buzz"?

A: In the book, Buzz is called the "collective stream of consciousness." It's the noise made by everyone's chatter, the noise that goes through your mind as you move about in the modern world. It's a one note sound. Buzz is without pitch. It makes no distinction between high and low, culture and marketing. It is thoroughly commercial, and ruled by commercial values.

Like my first book, Deeper, Nobrow is a narrative quest into the unknown. In Deeper, the unknown was cyberspace, here it's Buzz.

Q: You talk about the "Townhouse" view of culture vs. the "Megastore" view--what are the characteristics of each?

A: The Townhouse was the old world of high and low culture. It was like the world depicted in the movie Titantic, where the aristocrats dress in white-tie, listen to Strauss, and occupy the upper floors of the boat, while the peasants are down below, singing folk songs and dancing on tables. This separation of high and low culture was based on the assumption that some forms of art were more valuable than other forms of art, an idea that arose around the end of the 18th century, when the old system of artistic patronage was dying, and a new, commercial marketplace for artists and writers was coming into existence. The notion of high culture was a way of protecting the real artists from the hacks who ruled that new marketplace.

The Megastore is the new world of Nobrow, where high culture and low culture, previously kept apart by cultural arbiters, are brought together. In the Megastore, the soundtrack to Titanic is the best selling classical music album in history, one that helps keep the dying classical enteprise afloat. In the book the actual Megastore I refer to is the Virgin Megastore in Times Square, but I could just as easily be talking about Las Vegas or Jon Jerde's highbrow malls, or any other prominent consumer space in Brand USA.

Q: How does the idea of marketing operate in a "big grid" vs. a "small grid" system?

A: There is a hierarchy inside the Megastore, but it is not a hierarchy of high and low. It is a hierarchy of alternative and mainstream--small grid and big grid. But this grid hierarchy is much more unstable than the old, more vertical townhouse hierarchy, because the small grids are always being mainstreamed into the big grid, and new small grids are springing up to take their place.

I borrowed the terms "small grid" and "big grid" from George Trow, who may have got the idea from Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed long ago that Americans, lacking a definite sense of the reality of the social world, tend to become preoccupied with two things: immense spectacles and their own puny existences.

Q: You write, "MTV was a natural starting place to look for Nobrow." Why? How does that network epitomize the concept of Nobrow?

A: MTV was right down the street from my office at the New Yorker, so it was convenient. As one of Tina's staff writers, I was necessarily a kind of Buzzcateer--my job was trying to figure out a way to bring Buzz to the moribund magazine Tina took over, a magzine whose authority had once rested on keeping the Buzz out. MTV was a model of a Buzz making enterprise, adept at capturing the energy and excitement of the small grids and packaging it for the big grid.

Q: You write, "The words 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' are American inventions, devised for a specifically American purpose: to make culture into class." Explain.

A: In England and Europe there were social hierachies--high class and low class people. In the United States of America, where everyone was supposed to be equal there was no social hierarchy. But in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, there was a need in certain Americans to be perceived as higher, socially, than other people. So people used culture to take the place of birth and social pedigree. What kind of culture you enjoyed, whether it was high, middle, or low, was a sign of what kind of person you were--highbrow, middlebrow or lowbrow.

For more than a century, this hierarchy of culture offered Americans with money, education and power a means of distinguishing themselves from the uneducated and the poor. Highbrow/lowbrow was the language by which culture was translated into status--the pivot on which distinctions of taste became distinctions of caste. The system was more egalitarian than a social hierarchy, although it had a special snobbishness all its own.

Q: How has your experience at the New Yorker informed your idea of Nobrow?

A: Tina Brown's New Yorker is only a small part of Nobrow, but since I happened to be working there when she arrived, I have made Brown's magazine Exhibit A in my larger picture of this new cultural landscape. For me, and for millions of readers, Tina brought this new supercharged pop culture into our lives. It had been around before Tina, but it had always been possible to avoid it. Now it was unavoidable.

The challenge faced by Brown, in her attempt to revive the New Yorker and make it more relevant to modern readers, was to let the Buzz into the pages without losing the magazine's moral authority, which in the past was based in part on keeping the Buzz out. All sorts of pop culture subjects--rock stars, MTV, Howard Stern, StarWars--that were off limits at the old New Yorker, because they were in poor taste, were now possible to do. Pieces on the old cultural arbiters--the museum directors, opera house managers, and art collectors--were replaced with pieces on the new cultural arbiters: Barry Diller and Michael Eisner and Calvin Klein. The old tastemakers, those editors, curators, and grants administrators, who had influenced taste in the past, were fading away, and new tastemakers like David Geffen, George Lucas, Martha Stewart, and Tina Brown were assuming control.

Q: Your last book, Deeper, was about social life on the Internet. How does Nobrow relate to that?

A: Deeper was about the Net as utopia. It was written in 1996, when the Internet was still fast and loose and out-of-control. With the arrival of the Web, midway through the book, the Internet began to turn into something else--more like an entertainment medium than a giant ham radio. In Deeper I compared the old Internet to a field, and the Web to a carnival that had been set up in the middle of that field.

In a sense, Nobrow is all about that carnival. Nobrow is the cultural landscape of the AOL-Time Warner merger, a world in which community is constructed around pop cultural preferences, and where entertainment becomes what we communicate about.

Q: Where do you see examples of Nobrow on a typical walk through your neighborhood?

A: I live in downtown Manhattan, so I shop and walk around in Soho a lot. Soho is Nobrow incarnate--the new world of consumer capitalism. Capitalism was based on need. Consumerism is based on choice. Soho is all about choice, almost never about need. In Soho you can buy fancy sunglasses, rare cheeses, high modernist soap dishes, edible flowers, plastics, fashions, and cell phones, cell phones, cell phones. And of course there's art. But in Soho, everything is an art, and art, stripped of its veneer of superior reality, is just another commodity.

Q: You spent some time with Ben Kweller, a fifteen year old kid supposedly destined for a musical stardom he never attained. Would you agree that Ben in many ways represents the dark side of a Nobrow culture.

A: Ben, now the grand old age of eighteen, and his band (Radish) may attain stardom yet. My purpose in profiling this early phase of his career was to shed some light on the larger phenomenon of kiddie rockers, or "baby bands" as they are known in the rock business, and to show how the constant pressure to find new talent, especially acts who are the same age as their fifteen year old audiences, puts extraordinary and strange pressure, not only on kids like Ben, but on their parents, in Ben's case Howie and Dee Kweller.

Q: You point to Andy Warhol as a major catalyst in "the collapse of Townhouse culture." How so? And who else do you think has been unusually influential in this arena?

A: Andy Warhol was what I call in the book "proto-Nobrow." He was one of the builders of the hierarchy, but he didn't live to see the full working out of his ideas. Warhol popularized the message that low could be high, and that art could be made out of Brillo boxes and mechanically silkscreened photographs. But Pop Art was still high art, in the sense that it was set apart from the mainstream. And, socially, Warhol gathered around him a crowd who were as elite as any gathering of Abstract Expressionists at Peggy Guggenheim's house.

There is no Andy Warhol of Nobrow. In Nobrow the pop stars themselves are the elite. Instead of a silver-painted Factory where the Velvet Underground is hanging out, you've got the MTV Video Awards. Warhol was obsessed with celebrity, but he always brought irony to that obsession--in his worship of celebrity he seemed to abase himself in a way that was intended as satire.

In Nobrow, celebrity worship isn't that complicated. Instead of Andy there is In Style magazine, where the assumption is that celebrities' tastes are to be emulated not because they're attractive or cool, but simply because they are the tastes of celebrities.

Q: How has Nobrow changed the definition of "taste."

A: I think the whole notion of good taste--this necessarily elite substance only a relative few could possess--has pretty much disappeared. These days anyone can get good taste from Martha Stewart. You can buy it from Ikea or Restoration Hardware. At the same time, formerly bad taste--pro wrestling, pornography, Donald Trump--has become acceptable to the mainstream. So at both ends, the importance of taste has been devalued, at least "taste" in the old sense of something refined. Also, we're too decentralized as a culture for good taste to carry the meaning it used to carry.

When people ask themselves if they want to wear a shirt, or buy a certain object for their homes, do they ask themselves a question like, "Is this product in good taste?" I don't think so, not usually. They ask themselves something more like "What does this shirt or chair say about me?" Cultural preferences once based on matters of taste are now based on identity. This change is a major theme in Nobrow.

Q: You title your chapter on George Lucas "The Empire Wins." What do you mean by that?

A: I mean that it seems as if Lucas' business talents have proven to be greater than his artistic talents. Look at the evolution of the Star Wars movies. The movies were good when they were conceived by an artistic rebel, but now they have the feeling of being made by a master toymaker, which is a very different thing. You could already feel this starting to happen at the end of Jedi, the third film in the series: the lovable Ewoks seemed destined for the toy store even before they helped Luke defeat the Empire. The Phantom Menance was another step in this direction.

Q: What really is the difference between the culture of marketing and the marketing of culture?

A: Ultimately, I don't think there is any difference. One person's culture is another person's marketing. Pop songs made for artistic reasons are used to market cars, while T-shirts that market brand names are worn as culture. Hip-hop songs, where the best rhymes often turn on brand names, are marketing and culture at the same time.

Q: Is the erosion of our highbrow/lowbrow distinctions good or bad?

A: Both. In the old high culture, your choices were limited. You couldn't mix lowbrow and highbrow culture as easily as you can today. Now you can even get status points for choices that cut across the old high/low lines. That's good, for the most part. It empowers the fringes, which is healthy for all. Old standards are lost but new, more egalitarian standards evolve. I'm an optimist about the ability of people to work it out for the best.