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This book examines nobrow, a cultural formation that intertwines art and entertainment into an identifiable creative force. In our eclectic and culturally turbocharged world, the binary of highbrow vs. lowbrow is incapable of doing justice to the complexity and artistry of cultural production. Until now, the historical power, aesthetic complexity, and social significance of nobrow “artertainment” have escaped analysis. This book rectifies this oversight. Smart, funny, and iconoclastic, it scrutinizes the many faces of nobrow, throwing surprising light on the hazards and rewards of traffic between high entertainment and genre art.
In this unusually wide-ranging study, spanning more than a century and covering such diverse forms of expressive culture as Shakespeare, Central Park, symphonies, jazz, art museums, the Marx Brothers, opera, and vaudeville, a leading cultural historian demonstrates how variable and dynamic cultural boundaries have been and how fragile and recent the cultural categories we have learned to accept as natural and eternal are. For most of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of expressive forms—Shakespearean drama, opera, orchestral music, painting and sculpture, as well as the writings of such authors as Dickens and Longfellow—enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity. In the nineteenth century Americans (in addition to whatever specific ethnic, class, and regional cultures they were part of) shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival groupings than their descendants were to experience. By the twentieth century this cultural eclecticism and openness became increasingly rare. Cultural space was more sharply defined and less flexible than it had been. The theater, once a microcosm of America—housing both the entire spectrum of the population and the complete range of entertainment from tragedy to farce, juggling to ballet, opera to minstrelsy—now fragmented into discrete spaces catering to distinct audiences and separate genres of expressive culture. The same transition occurred in concert halls, opera houses, and museums. A growing chasm between “serious” and “popular,” between “high” and “low” culture came to dominate America’s expressive arts. “If there is a tragedy in this development,” Lawrence Levine comments, “it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period—and many have still not regained—their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.” In this innovative historical exploration, Levine not only traces the emergence of such familiar categories as highbrow and lowbrow at the turn of the century, but helps us to understand more clearly both the process of cultural change and the nature of culture in American society.
Verzameling essays die een beeld geven van de wijze waarop de 20e eeuwse Amerikaanse intelligentsia tegen hun eigen (massa)cultuur aankijkt
New York City: a battered town left for dead, one that almost a million people abandoned and where those who remained had to live behind triple deadbolt locks. It was reinvigorated and became the capital of wealth and innovation, an engine of cultural vibrancy, a magnet for immigrants, and a city of endless possibility. Since its founding in 1968, New York Magazine has told the story of that city's constant morphing, week after week. This book draws from all that coverage to present an enormous, sweeping, idiosyncratic picture of a half-century at the center of the world. It constitutes an unparalleled history of that city's transformation, and of a New York City institution as well.
Swirski begins with a series of groundbreaking questions about the nature of popular fiction, vindicating it as an artform that expresses and reflects the aesthetic and social values of its readers. He follows his insightful introduction to the socio-aesthetics of genre literature with a synthesis of the century long debate on the merits of popular fiction and a study of genre informed by analytic aesthetics and game theory. Swirski then turns to three "nobrow" novels that have been largely ignored by critics. Examining the aesthetics of "artertainment" in Karel Capek's War with the Newts, Raymond Chandler's Playback, and Stanislaw Lem's Chain of Chance, crossover tours de force, From Lowbrow to Nobrow throws new light on the hazards and rewards of nobrow traffic between popular forms and highbrow aesthetics.
This collection of essays represents key contributions to 'transgression cinema:' overlooked, forgotten, or under-analyzed movies that walk the fine line between 'arthouse' and 'grindhouse' film.
Brings together work of leading Lowbrow and Pop Surrealist artists. With over 100 examples by two dozens artists. Provides a timeline of the movement with graphic artists profiles.
A brilliant line-up of international contributors examine the implications of the portrayals of Nazis in low-brow culture and that culture's re-emergence today
A wake-up call for creatives who need that inspiring kick to finally create the thing they’ve been meaning to make, while celebrating the journey of trying, learning, and failing. Over the last eight years, Jason Bacher and Brian Buirge of Good F*cking Design Advice (GFDA) have made a name for themselves in the international design community, inspiring creatives, artists, and entrepreneurs with their products, weekly e-mails, and most important, their unorthodox advice about work ethic and the creative process. Do the F*cking Work is a collection of 100 beautifully packaged pieces that showcase their irreverent advice—inspiration that will help unstick even the most dedicated procrastinators. Covering everything from drinking your morning coffee to handling productive criticism, from embracing failure to rejecting the status quo, their insights upend conventional thinking and teach you to embrace and celebrate the journey of creation—the joy of trying, failing, learning, and sometimes failing again. To make something good we have to make some mistakes. Bacher and Buirge teach you to embrace the unknown and to f*cking laugh at yourself during the process. There is a method to their madness—a surprising reassurance that is baked into their bluntness. We’re all trying, messing up, and trying again. And there’s joy to be found in that—something we often overlook in our rush to get everything done and get it right the first time. With personal insights, actionable advice, stylish visuals, and lots of colorful language, Do the F*cking Work will leave you feeling renewed and inspired, and will make you see that the value of work is as much about the process as the outcome.
On an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific, Managua—the only native who can read or write—is busily translating Hamlet into pidgin English when a plane interrupts his noble work. Strapping on his false leg, he makes his way to the landing strip to greet the unexpected arrival: William Hardt, a young American lawyer driven by his misguided ambition to win reparations for the island's inhabitants. Hardt is not the first white outsider to pay a visit; the British came earlier, bringing their language, the small pigs that run wild in the jungle, and Shakespeare . . . and the Americans followed with guns, land mines, and Coca-Cola. But in this place of riotously logical ritual, Hardt's determined quest to do good could make him the most devastating visitor of all. Profoundly moving and achingly funny, One Big Damn Puzzler brilliantly explores the collision of the twenty-first century with unsullied pagan reality—and establishes John Harding as one of the most imaginative contemporary chroniclers of the human condition.