Reddit reviews Nobrow : The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture

> yet when it comes to music, suddenly popularity becomes a marker of quality.

It's a bit of a tangent – and you might be completely across this anyway – but plenty has been written and spoken about the collapse of traditional "low" and "high" cultural distinctions, with instead a focus on popularity as the indicator of worth, validity, etc. I really enjoyed this book on the subject.

A bit dandy? This is a blog I imagined the father of the author of Nobrow would write.

I think you are on to something.

1st, quickly, yeah the Mona Lisa is a bit distracting because this piece (among others) are very unique examples in being both 1) an object of critical and historical importance and at the same time 2) exist as a mass market "sign" or "icon" for capital A "Art" beyond just being a good painting. It sort of bloats their significance over other worthy pieces that are less well known. There's a great documentary from Robert Hughes The Mona Lisa Curse that traces this process.

2nd, yes, totally on point on the second paragraph. The three point negotiation in the way Mike talked about between Artist, Media, and Audience is, in a broad way, a characteristic of really all cultures that create art, popular or otherwise. What he is kind of missing is the discussion of the Marxian power struggle between social classes. High-class, powerful groups create the dominant art, low classes may internalize it or reject it for their own art, and through that process struggle to define a general cultural status quo. In other words, High-brow art and low-brow art compete and negotiate to create "No-Brow" art or art for everyone, if I may borrow the term from John Seabrook.

So "popular culture" (or maybe "populous culture") becomes the hegemony become basically all culture as it transcends unequal class divisions. The ubiquity of media we have today without the rigid division of class seems to suggest that to be the culture that we have now. But if anything, that would assume "hegemony popular culture" to be basically uniform and homogenous because it's everyone, a one-size-fits-all. That seems wrong and if anything we don't see culture building towards any consensus, we see it fragmenting into a fractal series of diverse subcultures and subcultures within subcultures. The difference being that cultural divisions are not based on power or class or even geography, they are defined more and more by taste and these "taste cultures" or "niche cultures" can be as big or as small as they want to be.

So "pop culture" in this way is not a monolith but is seen as this diverse web of niche cultures of various sizes and overlapping relationships. What makes them "pop" is that they are not defined hierarchically (high and low culture) but are all treated equally (anyone can like anything). This equality is the end result of the negotiation first talked about between Artist, Media, and Audience.