Seabrook culture marketing marketing culture. John SeabrookNobrow

American cultural critic, journalist and columnist New magazine Yorker John Seabrook found the word most suitable to describe modern culture - "nobrow" ( nobrow):culture is not high ( highbrow -“abstruse”, “high-browed” or, literally, “high-browed”) and not low ( lowbrow- “low-browed”), and not even average (middlebrow), but existing generally outside the old hierarchy of taste. Seabrook has written a wonderful and very useful book about the blurring boundaries between elite and commercial culture, the changing nature of authorship, and the place and role in new system aristocratic cultural institutions like the museums we know well. With the kind permission of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, we are publishing a fragment of the chapter “From Aristocracy to the Supermarket.”

There are no illustrations in Seabrook's monograph. But Artguide prides itself on being a richly illustrated publication. We thought about it and decided to approach this issue in Nobrow style: enter the key words and phrases for this text into a Google search query - nobrow, “noise”, “aristocratism”, “supermarket”, etc. - and see what visual equivalent the search engine offers .

3. From aristocracy to supermarket

<…>The same problem that confronted The New Yorker in the nineties was typical of many cultural institutions—museums, libraries, foundations: how to let Noise, in order to maintain vitality and creditworthiness, but not to lose his moral authority, which was based at least in part on exclusion Noise?

MTV became my invitation to what I later called knowbrow. Tina's very vague idea was for me to spend some time MTV and wrote how this TV channel functions. Despite the historical and cultural distance from each other, MTV was located quite conveniently, on the corner of Forty-fourth and Broadway, a five-minute walk from the New Yorker. And I spent a month moving back and forth, to Time Square and back.

I tried to show all this schematically. The supermarket culture looks like this:

Individuality

Subculture

Mainstream culture

And aristocratic culture looked like this:

High culture

Culture of average intellectual level

Mass culture

If the old hierarchy was vertical, then the new hierarchy knowbrow existed in three or more dimensions. Subculture played the same role as high culture once did: it developed trends for culture in general. IN knowbrow the subculture was the new high culture, and the high culture became just another subculture. But above the subculture and the mainstream lay identity—the only common standard, the Kantian “subjective universality.”

Starting at the supermarket and working backwards can teach you something about evolution knowbrow. The building of aristocratic culture has always been divided into upper and lower floors. On top of it, along with recognized creators, were rich people, with whose money museums and opera houses were built, in which high culture was carefully preserved. Downstairs were the masses who watched shows like Cops, listened to gangsta rap, and read the New York Post. While the masses were barred from the top floor, the elite sometimes descended to the lower level, like Kate Winslet descending from the top deck in the movie Titanic, to enjoy simple pleasures and nostalgia for the time before the original sin that commodified culture and made it necessary the existence of a bastion of aristocratic culture.

Why was this necessary? To protect real artists and writers from market attacks. A bastion of aristocratic culture emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, when the attitude of the artist towards those who financed him began to change. Patronage was dying out, middle-class readers and commercial publishing houses, on the contrary, were multiplying, artists and writers, who had previously obeyed the dictates of their patrons, were thrown to the mercy of the market. And if in some respects this new patron, the market, turned out to be more loyal - the artist, for example, was given freedom for the first time in choosing themes for his work - then in other respects the market turned out to be an even greater tyrant. He was uneducated, insensitive, easily bored, and did not care about the high standards of his old patrons. Some artists and writers managed to please a new patron only by sacrificing old standards.

Thus the need arose for a system that would separate the creators from the artisans, and the genuine art of the old aristocracy from the commercial art produced by the cultural capitalists for the newly urbanized masses. Thus, the romantic concept of "culture" evolved to meet this need. The word itself, according to Wordsworth and Coleridge, had two sources of origin: French civilization, meaning the process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, and the German culture, describing any characteristic lifestyle. The French word was conservative and unambiguous, including a moral component, the German one was more relativistic and not directly related to morality. English word culture became a hybrid of the two, although in the nineteenth century it was closer in usage to the strict French father than to the more free-spirited German mother. Since the culture came to America from France and England, the French meaning of the word dominated.

According to the Romantic concept of culture, the works of true artists and writers were the ultimate reality—works that, through their creativity, rose above the everyday world of standard cultural production. The artists themselves were considered exceptional, gifted beings with supernatural talents - passionate geniuses who created not for sale, but in the name of a higher ideal. As Raymond Williams wrote in Culture and Reality, “It is known that simultaneously with the growth of the market and the idea of ​​​​professional production, another system of perception of art arose, in which the most important elements are, firstly, a special attitude towards the work of art as a “creative truth”, and, secondly, the recognition of the creator as a special being. There is a temptation to consider these theories as a direct response to last changes in the relationship between the artist and society... At a time when the artist is perceived as just another producer of a market commodity, he considers himself a particularly gifted person, a guiding star Everyday life" In short, the concept of "culture" has always been part of smart market strategy.

From Wordsworth to the group Rage Against the Machine art created for idealistic reasons in clear disregard of the laws of the market was considered more valuable than art created for sale. It was not enough for an artist to simply have the talent to give people what they want. To achieve fame, the artist had to pretend that he didn't care what people wanted. This was quite difficult to do, since any artist strives for public approval, like any human being in general. Oscar Wilde is a famous example of this. In his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” he wrote: “A work of art is a unique embodiment of a unique personality. It is beautiful because its creator does not betray himself. It is completely independent of the thoughts of others, whatever these thoughts may be. And in fact, as soon as an artist begins to take into account the thoughts of other people and tries to embody other people’s demands, he ceases to be an artist and becomes an ordinary or brilliant craftsman, an honest or careless artisan.” Naturally, Wilde knew well what people wanted and how to give it to them. He used his essays to hide this ability of his.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the edifice of aristocratic culture collapsed. It happened as quickly as an earthquake when Andy Warhol exhibited his drawings of soup cans and Coca-Cola cans at the Stable Gallery in 1962. But at the same time it was also a very slow process, because in the twentieth century the deep structural problems of high culture were emphasized by the sheer diversity and ingenuity of commercial culture. Critics, curators and editors have fought courageously to maintain the boundary between high art and popular culture, between handmade and conveyor production, between unique and repeated. These cultural arbiters warred with wrestlers, soap opera divas, and talk show hosts in an effort to preserve some meaning in the traditional division between the old elite culture and the new commercial culture. The last stronghold of New York intellectuals in the war for the old culture was self-irony, but it turned out to be only a temporary measure. She, too, was soon swept away and crushed by the pop culture hordes.

As the boundaries between elite and commercial culture blurred, the very words “commercial” and “selling out” became empty words. Questions from the old cultural arbiters like “Is this good?” and “Is this art?” were replaced by the question “Whose art is this?” Selecting “the best there is in the world,” in Arnold's words—what had once been the privilege, the duty, and the moral work of cultural arbiters—has become something immoral, an attempt by the elite to impose a very meager set of interests on the masses. An entire generation of cultural arbiters, whose authority depended to varying degrees on the persistence of the division between elite and commercial culture, was gradually displaced, and its place was taken by a new generation that knew how to tailor any content to a particular demographic or “psychographic” niche. There has been a subtle but profound shift in power from individual taste to the authority of the market.

The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, together with the publishing house Ad Marginem, published John Seabrook’s book “Nobrow. Marketing Culture. Marketing of culture". “Theories and Practices” talked with the author of the monograph about the collapse of the old cultural hierarchy, the history of the New Yorker magazine, which at one time had to change its editorial policy in order to make money, and also about how, thanks to the Internet, the crowd will be able to control the elite.

Let's start with your vocabulary. What does nobrow mean?

The fundamental idea of ​​my book was that there is no class system in the United States. We don't have social classes like they do in Europe. We replaced this system with a cultural hierarchy. It's about about the terms that are used in American sociology: highbrow (elite or high culture) and lowbrow (mass or low culture). That is, people were divided into upper and lower classes not by origin, but depending on their cultural preferences. This system existed most XX century, but by the end of the century it began to collapse.

When I say “nobrow” (I came up with this concept myself), I mean the world that appeared after the destruction of the old order. Mass culture became more and more influential and at some point began to influence the elite, who compromised and adjusted to this process, as a result of which they lost their status. I call this world without hierarchy “nobrow”.

Interesting thought about the lack of a class system in America. But what about the bourgeoisie and the people who work for them?

This is established in the constitution, this is the basis of our society - all people are born equal. It is clear that at the time this principle was proclaimed, everything was different: slave labor was widely used in the United States. That is, in principle there was no equality. But nevertheless, our system is fundamentally different from what was and partly still exists in Europe: we have no peasants, lords, kings or counts, a person is no worse than the rest, even if he was born into the wrong family. Regarding the bourgeois and proletarians, I would not say that we have such a clear division. Everything is much simpler: in America there are rich people and poor people. However, it is still common for a person to want to surpass others in anything. And in order not to contradict the declared political principles, another hierarchical system was invented: highbrow and lowbrow.

In your book, you describe this hierarchy using two metaphors. Compare old order with your father's mansion (townhouse), and the world of nobrow - with a supermarket (megastore).

Yes, the mansion is initially hierarchical - it has levels. Let's remember the classic English aristocratic house. There was a clear distinction: the lower level was for servants, the upper level was for masters. A supermarket, relatively speaking, is horizontal; there are no good or bad places. I used this metaphor not only because it implies a lack of hierarchy, but also because it directly refers to commerce. Objects in a supermarket differ not in cultural value or significance, but depending on other indicators: sales, popularity. We are talking about another key term in my book - “noise” (buzz). They arise around the most popular and commercially successful cultural phenomena.

In the world of nobrow, quantitative indicators become especially important: results in sports competitions, box office receipts in cinemas, and so on. They play a significant role in the cultural life of society. For example, a few years ago a film was released based on my book A Glimpse of Genius. This, in my opinion, quite worthy film could not compete with other films with flying robots and cute talking cats. That is, the film was located in a part of the supermarket that is not popular.

Don't you think that the collapse of elitist culture happened simply because people have become dumber and more superficial over the past 50 years?

There is a deal of truth in it. Commercial culture tends to simplify; it enforces standards and conformity. But it's not that simple. After all, it creates conditions for diversity. Over time, the consumer begins to experience boredom, and when something new appears on the market, something outside the generally accepted norms and standards, it becomes popular. That is, truly original and original art and music can find their mass consumer. As happened, for example, with grunge rock or hip-hop in their time. But everything new is sooner or later sucked into this system and turns into a new cultural standard. True dialectic!

You've been writing for the New Yorker for a long time. How did these processes affect the editorial policy of the publication? Could an article like the one you recently wrote about Rihanna have appeared in this magazine 30 years ago?

Of course not. In those days, instead of Rihanna there was, say, Diana Ross. There was no way the New Yorker would have published an article about her. The magazine went through a long and painful process of evolution. The editors saw commercial content as a threat - a force that could undermine the quality of the publication and destroy the highly intellectual standards that were implied by the New Yorker brand. By the end of the 80s, the magazine brought continuous losses to its owners. Changes were needed. They occurred with the appointment of Tina Brown as editor-in-chief in 1992. She completely changed the editorial policy of the publication: it was decided to cover pop culture and “noise” - what was being talked about around.

Some of these changes were necessary, but some of them were too much. And under the leadership of David Rednick, who took over the magazine in 1998, we have somewhat returned to our roots. David is a serious man who understands that the New Yorker is a commercial enterprise that needs to make money. But, on the other hand, he clearly understands the advantage of the magazine. He did not and does not have any preconceptions about pop culture, but nevertheless he believes that we should preserve our form style, even when we're talking about Rihanna. After all, you can’t pretend that this singer doesn’t exist, because absolutely everyone - whether they like it or not - knows about her. We are talking about phenomena. We are trying to understand the underlying mechanisms and reasons for the popularity of celebrities. That is, the subject of study may be pop culture, but the approach remains the same - the signature serious analysis from the New Yorker.

Books by John Seabrook translated into Russian:

John Seabrook, Nobrow. Marketing culture. Marketing of Culture"

On the one hand, social media confirmed nobrow's ideas. In the book I use two more terms: “big grid” and “small grid”. The first concept includes truly massive, global phenomena: for example, blockbusters. They influence your life in one way or another - it doesn't matter whether you watch them or not. And the second term refers to a narrower range of cultural objects - those that have special meaning for you and your friends. So, with the development of the Internet, the large circle has expanded even more (blockbusters are now everywhere, now dozens of prequels and sequels are being filmed for each of them), and the small circle has narrowed. In the book, I talked about MTV videos as the conveyor belt through which this happens. Now, with the advent of services such as YouTube, these processes have received an unprecedented boost.

Another idea that the development of the Internet has confirmed is that the creator is also a merchant. That is, in the old world, where there was a hierarchy based on the differences between elite and mass culture, there was always an obvious line between the artist and the marketer. When this system collapsed, the artist acquired additional properties and functions - he began to openly and purposefully sell his work. This is neither good nor bad - this is what the evolution of mechanisms has led to. The same YouTube confirmed this process. Now a content creator, when posting his product online, has an initial sales mindset. He encourages you to like his video or subscribe to his channel. In addition, he is aware that the display of his work is accompanied by advertising.

But there is one thing that has changed since 2000. I mean a return to some kind of hierarchy. New curators, so-called tastemakers, have appeared. Due to the fact that the “noise” has increased and an incredible amount of content has appeared, people have a need for some kind of filters. And these new curators fulfill this function. It turns out that they are in a higher position. But in any case, this hierarchy is different from what it was before: the selection criteria, of course, do not correspond to the standards of the old elitist culture, they are more democratic.

Recommend three books.

Biography of Steve Jobs - for those who want to understand how inventions work in modern world. In the context of Nobrow, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson is very interesting. This is a commercially successful book, a thriller, that is, real pop culture. However, after reading it, you can take a different look at the topic of treatment of a woman, violence applied to her.

In general, there is a big topic that I am currently interested in - the crowd, the masses. It seems to me that the role of the Internet is noteworthy in this regard. A person is deprived of an obvious biological connection with another person, the connection that allows ants to live in an anthill, and birds and fish to move in a school. Therefore, there is a fear of the crowd: it is believed that it suppresses the mind, human individuality and acts instinctively and aggressively. By the way, this is one of the reasons why intellectuals have prejudices towards pop culture. The Internet begins to fill this biological gap; it acts as a collective mind, with the help of which the crowd acts in an extremely organized and responsible manner, fighting for good goals. For example, the Occupy movement in the USA. I know about your government's attempts to limit the right to hold rallies and demonstrations, but thanks to the Internet, all these attempts lose all meaning. People will be able to organize online, and if anything happens, it will be impossible to stop them. This is an interesting and useful deterrent for the elites. There is a wonderful book about the crowd: “The Psychology of Nations and Masses” by Gustave Le Bon. Be sure to read it.

Additionally, I want to expand on the research I did while writing Nobrow to a more global level. Therefore, I am now actively studying the commercial culture of Asia: for example, Korean pop music. They take Western music with all its inherent themes: sex, body cult, and so on. And they add their own traditional themes there: for example, they sing about respect for parents. It makes for a very fun combination. One book about modern culture Far East, unfortunately no. But I can recommend the incredibly interesting non-fiction People who eat darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry about unknown aspects of sexuality in Japan.

3 books John Seabrook recommends

At the dawn of the 21st century, popular music seems to have reached a completely new phase of development. In order to write a song, you no longer need to play the guitar masterfully and have poetic talent, and to sing it, you don’t need a powerful voice - welcome...

• 14 April 2015, 21:03

Genre: ,

I tried to find an informal style that would well reflect my nature as I imagined it at that time. (As you know, clothes are not about who we are, but about who we would like to be.) In the process, I realized the melancholic truth that inevitably reveals itself to all men when trying to master the new office casual: dressing informally, a man is obliged to take fashion much more seriously than when the office has a strict dress code. The new informal style, like the old informal style, is designed to convey the idea of ​​lightness and comfort. However, unlike the old one, the new informal style is about status.

• December 21, 2013, 03:39

Genre: ,

How has the cultural landscape changed since the emergence of the global supermarket? What happened to modern art after Andy Warhol, to pop music after Nirvana and MTV, to cinema after Star Wars? And are the old concepts of taste and style so important today, when the label on your T-shirt is more valuable than its style? John Seabrook, a columnist for the New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, GQ, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Village Voice, offers answers to these questions in his book. His research is a guide to modern culture, in which information noise is more important than the event itself, quality is equal to relevance, and no one is able to separate the product from its positioning, and cultural value from market value. Welcome to the world of Nobrow! The world in which you have been living for a long time, although you are afraid of yourself in it...

Joint publishing program of the Museum contemporary art Garage and Ad Marginem Publishing House

A book about modern culture by New Yorker magazine columnist John Seabrook. Analysis of a system of cultural coordinates in which there is no division into “high” (elite) and “low” (mass) culture.

Author of the magazine New Yorker John Seabrook writes in his book about the collapse of the usual cultural hierarchy of high and low, elite and mass, good and bad taste. Today, cultural products, like other goods - cars, clothes and shoes, interior items - are subject to marketing criteria: fashionable/not fashionable, sold/not sold. The usual hierarchy of “high” (elite) and “low” (mass) culture has been replaced by a single field of culture knowbrow.

In his book, Seabrook writes about the key phenomena of nobrow: about the musical culture shaped by the MTV channel, about the group Nirvana - the main destroyers of the once unshakable barrier between underground and pop music, about the film epic of George Lucas " star Wars”, which created a new “non-religious mythology”, about the magazine New Yorker and other media that have become spokesmen for the new cultural hierarchy knowbrow, about modern fashion, in which the old criteria of taste and style no longer apply, and the label has become much more important than the style, about design and contemporary art.

about the author

John Seabrook- American writer, journalist, contributor to New Yorker magazine since 1993. Graduated from Princeton University. Author of the books “Nobrow. Marketing culture. Marketing Culture" (2000), "Flash of Genius and others true stories invention" (2008), "Song machine. Inside the hit factory" (2015), etc.

Dedicated to Lisa

The old distinctions between the high culture of the aristocracy and the commercial culture of the masses were destroyed, and in their place a hierarchy of “fashionability” arose. Of course, knowbrow is not a culture completely devoid of hierarchy, but in it commercial culture is a potential source of status, and not an object of elite rejection.

Financial Times

“Seabrook's thesis, as well as his astonishingly precise formulations, is perhaps the best and certainly the most compelling language that can be used to describe the influence of marketing on modern culture.”

1. Place in Shum

I entered the Franklin Street subway car and the doors slammed shut behind me. The clock showed eleven in the morning, and the carriage was half empty. I stretched my legs into the aisle and began reading the New York Post with my usual formula: one stop for the gossip column, two for media news and four for sports, although this day I allowed myself as many as five to read the basketball preview. match between the New York Knicks and Indiana Pacers. On my head, over a prison-style nylon cap, were expensive black headphones from a CD player, a fashion I had adopted from the guys in rap videos.

The player was playing Biggie Smalls album Ready to Die:

I have a strong poetic gift
I'll give you my dick
Your kidneys are screwed
Here we are, here we are
But I'm not your Domino
I have my music
She'll rip your panties off
So
Guess
What is my size
In jeans Karl Kani
Thirteen, do you know what this is?

Looking up from the newspaper, I looked at the other passengers. People were mostly coming from Brooklyn. Some also had rap playing in their headphones. External urban emptiness with internal restlessness and extremism of music. I experienced the same strange sense of detachment that one feels walking the cleaned-up streets of Mayor Giuliani-era New York. At first glance, everything is simply wonderful: great financial prosperity for the minority, money everywhere, a consumer paradise in the stores. But behind that façade, there is a world of those unfortunate people who are shoved into the dirty floor by cops while handcuffing them, a life that people like me have only seen on Cops. Rap, and especially gangsta rap, combines the ideology of profit and racism: a false demonstration of prosperity and happiness in Manhattan and genuine social problems ordinary people. At least in the eighties, there were a lot of homeless people on the streets, as if reminiscent of the terrible social injustice in society, but now most of them have also been “cleaned out”.

Back to the paper, I let the gangsta rap get to me, the white guy, and I say, “Man, you're the coolest, and none of these people here in this fucking car can fuck you, and if anyone does If he takes a risk, I’ll kill everyone. Do you even fucking know who I am?”

Coming out of the subway to Time Square, I put the player in the pocket of my leather jacket, holding it on the floor with my hand so that the disc would not “jump” when walking. There was no snow on the sidewalk, only a thin, chalk-like coating of frost, which always happens in January - the soles slide on it. The air seemed blurred by the strange yellow glow of Time Square in daylight, a mixture of sun and advertising lights, real and artificial. This was the color Noise. Noise (Buzz)- a collective stream of consciousness, William James's "noisy confusion", an objectified, formless substance in which politics and gossip, art and pornography, virtue and money, the glory of heroes and the fame of murderers are mixed. In Time Square you can feel how Noise penetrates your consciousness. And he calmed me down. I would sometimes stop here on my way to or from work, letting the yellow glow penetrate my brain. At such moments, the external world and the world of my consciousness became one.

Moving along the sidewalk, I noticed that everyone walking towards me certainly glances at the large television screen Panasonic Astrovision on the corner of Time Square behind me. I turned around. On the screen I saw President Clinton - raising his hand and holding his breath, he solemnly swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States of America. It was the day of his inauguration. Damn, I completely forgot that today is such an important day for the country. Sheltered from the cold wind behind the telephone booths on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third Street, I watched the ceremony, reading the words of the President's oath of office in the subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

Directly below Clinton, the electronic display of the Dow Jones Industrial Average reported good news about the situation in the economy. A ten-meter bottle of Budweiser beer could be seen above the president's head, and even higher - a giant plate of pasta. A good combination of symbols: money is below, in the richest layer of soil that provides food for culture, public policy, whose job is not to be a leader, but to entertain and distract, is in the middle, and at the very top is the product. Clinton seems to have entered this system absolutely painlessly. Here in Time Square, in a chaotic fusion of signs and brands - Coca-Cola, Disney, MTV, Star Wars, Calvin Cline - being so close to each other, as if it were Las Vegas, our leader felt very comfortable. Almost everyone was distracted from the business that brought them to Time Square, immediately stopped and stared at the huge image of the president who had just been re-elected for a second term.

Having completed the ceremony, Clinton walked up to the podium to deliver his inaugural address. I remained standing in the same spot next to a black man wearing an Oakland Raiders jacket. I read the subtitles on the screen, and B.I. G.'s lustful, murderous rap blared in my headphones, and in my brain, an image from a rap video appeared, superimposed on the image of the president. Meanwhile, the president continued to appeal to citizens' sense of responsibility:

“Each of us must take personal responsibility - not only for ourselves and our loved ones, but also for our neighbors, for the whole country...”

Don't give a damn about the past
We are now
In "500 SL",
"E" and "D" and ginger ale
Pockets swell
To the brim
Full of Benjamins.

Even though I tried to focus on the meaning of the president's words, I couldn't help but, as usual, try to figure out the meaning of the rap song at the same time. “500 SL” is obviously a “Mercedes 500 SL”, and the Benjamins are Benjamin Franklins, that is, hundred dollar bills. “E” and “D”... Hmmm... Ah, I see - Ernst and Giulio Gallo.

“But let us not forget: the greatest successes we have achieved, and the greatest successes we have yet to achieve, all of them lie in the human soul. In the end, all the wealth of the world and thousands of armies will not be able to withstand the strength and greatness of the human spirit."

Ronald Reagan's PR people skillfully manipulated his image, but thinking about him now, I think he was old-fashioned. Moral authority based on personal beliefs was important quality Reagan. But Clinton's presidency showed that you can lead a country without moral authority if you are cunning enough. Clinton gave polls public opinion such significance as none of the previous occupants of the White House. These surveys were more like market research. The same project that took place in the White House was worked on in the offices of media moguls in Time Square, and this project was present in all spheres of culture. It was an attempt to bring consumption and production closer together: to find out what the public needed and give it to them. Surveys, focus groups and other forms marketing research replaced the old value system based on intuition, and specific people were responsible for it. Now everything came down to numbers: ratings were assigned even to a culture that no one had previously tried to measure or express in numbers. Clinton was the ideal manager of such a society.

I turned onto Seventh Avenue. Time Square was changing. Sex shops were disappearing from it for the same reason that arthouse cinemas were disappearing from the Upper West Side: the line between art and pornography had blurred. Gone are the bars where prostitutes and pimps sat, gone are the video game halls where I spent many hours playing Missile Command in 1983. This game itself, the goal of which was to try to save the world, also disappeared. In games like Doom or Quake the most one could hope for was to save oneself. In place of video game halls there were now sporting goods stores, the shops Gap, coffee shops Starbucks and megastore Virgin, selling goods under the “America” brand, which will soon turn into the “World” brand. The new Time Square was praised by many as being much better than the old one (the New York Times, the opinion leader on the topic, owned a large chunk of Time Square.) But all that had happened so far had been destruction unique local culture and replacing it with an average marketing culture, and the new Time Square did not seem better to me. For me it was a huge disaster.

Crossing Forty-fifth Street, I passed a cafe All Star and went to the megastore Virgin. The spontaneous street flavor fits surprisingly organically into the thoughtful interior of the music store. Shoppers moved smoothly, enjoying the visual and audio cacophony, oblivious to the virtual world outside. Standing on the escalator, they glanced at each other as they slowly drifted in and out of the lukewarm bath of pop culture. Small monitors and two huge screens overhead showed video clips. All this flickering and movement on the screens seemed to have an irresistible effect on the receptors of the brain, which, after all these centuries of evolution, still could not help but respond to movement (maybe it still hunts flies? Makes sure there are no predators nearby ?). Andy Warhol made this phenomenon a core principle of his film aesthetic: “If an object moves, it will be looked at.”

Right at the entrance to the megastore there is a huge pop music department under the sign Rock/Soul which included its entire range - from the Eagles to Pere Ubu and Al Green - plus all sorts of irony, allusion, banality and boredom between these poles. This gigantic cultural treasure trove evoked many associations. Among the bands whose records were sold here were some that could be considered the pop culture equivalent of tags on the door showing how many centimeters a child has grown in a year. Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Neil Young, folk and country rock stars of the seventies, many of whom appeared on the label Asylum, founded by David Geffen - they all exuded a peaceful, simple feeling and became my first love in the world of pop music. As a twelve-year-old gloomy and depressed teenager, I listened to them in my room, turning off the lights. Punk rock saved me from the harmful fumes of folk rock: Iggy Pop, Patti Smith and SexPislols, and then Talking Heads, who made punk mainstream. What I didn't realize at the time was that the transition from the "fake" California sound to the "real" British underground punk sound was a major antithesis that would, in one way or another, define the entire subsequent development of pop music. After TalkingHeads groups came like Duran Duran, The Cure And The Cars, who turned the "authentic" punk rock sound into a fake one" new wave”, pushing me away from pop music in my early twenties. Later hairy bands of the eighties – Van Halen, Guns n' Roses and reborn Aerosmith– also did not contribute to my interest in pop music. And then Nirvana came along, the band that changed everything.

Before her, my cultural experience made a more or less majestic movement up the hierarchy of taste from commercial to elite culture. But when I heard Nirvana at age thirty-one, the flow of culture through me slowed, stopped, and then moved in a completely different direction. After Nirvana, I began to follow pop music with a vigor that I had never followed even as a teenager: I was thinking more about my future adult life than about music. Pop music helped me retain my teenage self, becoming a special touchstone for me as an adult. I became interested in hip-hop, then its subgenres like gangsta rap, then techno, and now I was listening to the whole huge layer between techno and hip-hop - acid, trance, jungle, big beat, ambient - and all this seemed to me to be the future pop music.

As a child, I thought that becoming an adult meant stopping listening to pop music and moving on to classical music or at least intelligent jazz. The hierarchy of taste was the ladder along which you moved towards your adult identity. The day you first put on an evening suit and went to the first performance of Aida with a Metropolitan Opera subscription was the day you crossed the invisible threshold into adulthood. But over the past five years, listening to pop music, I have sometimes experienced such sublime, almost mystical feelings that neither opera nor symphonic music have evoked in me for a long time - as if music, meaning and time are united together, filling you with an “oceanic feeling,” which, as Freud wrote, characterizes a powerful aesthetic experience.

A month earlier, I experienced an “ocean feeling” at a band concert Chemical Brothers at the Roxy club, where one of my friends took me. Chemical Brothers these are two young musician-programmers who emerged from the dance culture of the British city of Manchester, inspired by “ecstasy”. They began by performing in abandoned factory halls, remnants of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century and transformed into sources of late twentieth-century street style, but retaining a dark, infernal atmosphere.

We froze for an hour in the street in front of the Roxy, while shaven-headed guys in huge fur-lined jackets walked back and forth, muttering: “Who will sell the ticket, who will sell the ticket, who will sell the ticket.” As at other concerts, we turned out to be almost the oldest in the hall. Going to a concert by another new fashionable band was perhaps the main cultural pleasure of our adult lives. These spectacular moments of ecstatic union with the young stood apart from the predictable menu of respectable culture - modern plays, Rothko exhibitions, opera, the occasional happening in clubs Kitchen or Knitting Factory. After the concert we would return home to our wives and children and our refined menu of high, middle and low culture, something we were used to, but now, in the presence of music that did not fit into any traditional framework, we felt like never before.” alive,” elitist culture has never given us such a feeling.

Finally we got inside and went to the dance floor. Most of the guys standing there were only concerned with how to choose the right moment to take the substances they had brought with them, so that the peak of the drug high would coincide with the peak of the musical high. After quite a long wait, someone stepped onto the dark stage and the crowd went wild. An ominous rhythm began to pulse, as if pumping black squelching liquid from the computer and splashing it onto the audience. Then a sampled phrase from a Blake Baxter song was played, repeated four times: dabrothersgonnaworkitout (“brothers will sort it out”». – Approx. lane). After every four beats, a new computer rhythm was introduced into the mix, and the last thing featured a distorted guitar. Because the music was made on synthesizers, it had a geometric regularity, allowing one to intuitively understand where the lines of the sound were going and at what point they would merge. It was like reading a sonnet: you wait for a certain form before the content appears. A sound fusion was taking place: all the rhythmic variations and distortions, which previously seemed incompatible with each other, were about to converge in an explosion of united sound.

My friend turned to me and shouted: “Now it’s going to be REALLY loud!..”.

And then something seemed to burst, and enlightenment descended on me in the form of a powerful acoustic blow to the chest, throwing us back like pins in a bowling alley. Flickering spotlights illuminated the hair of one of the musicians - a blond man bent over an instrument - catching him at the most ideal moment: in his rapid upward movement from the subculture of clubs, drugs and computers into the mainstream music industry and channel MTV. The latter hoped to combine all the subgenres of techno and house music into one big genre, "Electronica", similar to the "Alternative Music" marketing category that emerged from the success of Nirvana. In just a month Chemical Brothers will be spinning with all their might MTV. In one of the crazy moments that evening, I turned around and saw the VFP zone danced Judy McGrath, President MTV.

Then came another flash, heralding the emergence of a new kind of pop icon: the artist with his own information console, from which sounds, styles, lights, ideas guzzle, the nervous agony of the cerebral cortex, trying to absorb all the digital information that is pouring into him. The heat in the club, the craziness of the crowd, the impact of the joint we had just smoked all contributed to a powerful cultural experience, a nobrow moment. (nobrow) – not high (highbrow - literally: high-browed. – Note trans.) and not low (lowbrow - low brow. – Note trans.), and not even average (middlebrow) culture, but a culture that exists generally outside the old hierarchy of taste. That moment was still fresh in my mind as I rode the escalator down to the bottom level of the megastore, carefully plunging into the bathtub Noise on the way to the imported discs department, where he hoped to find a record of legendary concerts Chemical Brothers in a London club Heavenly Social.

On the same level, to the right of the escalator, was the classical music department. Hidden behind thick glass walls from the harsh sounds from the adjacent department, where salsa, Afro-Gallic drums, reggae and Portuguese fado merged into a cacophony called world music, it was the underground bunker of the old elitist culture, its last refuge here in Time Square. A good video was often shown here, usually featuring James Levine at the conductor's stand or Vladimir Horowitz at the piano. Behind these thick glass walls there was a sense of academic sterility, to which modern composers have condemned classical music, deciding that popularity and commercial success are a compromise. All of them original ideas– electronic and atonal variations, sudden changes in melody – have long found pop cultural embodiment in the departments of jazz and techno. At the same time, the classical music industry has practically destroyed itself by continuing year after year to release recordings of the world's best orchestras playing the same standard set of works, despite the fact that the differences in performance may be of interest to very few, and even fewer connoisseurs will be able to detect this difference. As a result, a potentially interesting genre found itself in a prison of glass walls. The classical music department was practically empty; as I recently found out, you could take advantage of this and pay there for discs from other departments when there are long lines at the cash registers upstairs.

I didn't find what I was looking for in the import department, but I did find a few other albums I wanted to buy - a record by jungle DJ L.T. J. Bookem and a collection of rock/techno hybrid tracks Big Beat Manifesto.(A typical supermarket selling method: improving a product through a wider range of features and combining them in unexpected ways.) Also, back upstairs, I found a CD by an Essex band Underworld entitled Dubnoasswithmyheadman, which I was very complimentary of. Twenty minutes later I was back in Time Square, holding a red plastic bag containing $59.49 worth of CDs. I stopped on Forty-fifth Street and printed out the disk. Underworld, I opened the plastic box, took out a precious polyurethane candy from it and inserted it into the player.

Clinton had already finished his address to the citizens, and the people in Time Square turned their attention to other objects. I stood there for a while longer in the yellow glow, waiting for the techno music in my headphones to restore order to my consciousness, which had been disrupted by gangsta rap. The line “Skyscraper, I love you” stuck in my brain the same way poetry lines used to stick in my brain before I bought a Walkman and made pop music the soundtrack to my movements around the city.

I walked down Forty-fourth Street, past the elegant neoclassical scrollwork on the walls of the Belasco Theater and through the fluted columns of old New York elite culture. At Sixth Avenue I cut the corner, passing the Royalton Hotel. The hotel restaurant, called "44", was a kind of canteen of the publishing house Condé Nast. Almost every day, the most important editors could be seen on four benches upholstered in green and yellow velvet. Condé Nast, cultural arbiters of my world: Anna Wintour from Vogue, Graydon Carter from Vanity Fair, Tina Brown from The New Yorker and perhaps Art Cooper from GQ at table four, or perhaps one of the up-and-coming journalists who took this place of honor today. This restaurant has often been compared to Algonquin on Forty-fourth Street, but there it was intelligence that dominated, and at 44 it was status. The air in the restaurant seemed to become thicker with admiring glances directed at people who had achieved their status.

It was still early, and the magazine editors weren't yet in their usual seats, although there were already a few magazine types hanging out in the restaurant wearing jackets over black expensive T-shirts - a style that combined low and high that Cy Newhouse, the owner, liked Condé Nast.

At Forty-third I turned left and walked half a block to number twenty, which housed the offices of The New Yorker, my employer. Three young women dressed in black, smoking in the courtyard, slipped through the revolving door in front of me.

The New Yorker occupied three floors, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth. Editors and journalists worked on the sixteenth and seventeenth floors, and the advertising department and management were located above them. Although management could be seen on the “journalistic” floors—especially since Tina Brown became editor—the traditional “state-church” division—between the editorial and advertising departments—remained within the magazine. The severity of this division was especially noticeable in appearance the old New Yorker, where columns of text usually meant editorial content, and photographs and other eye-catching elements usually meant advertising.

The only time I was on the executive floor was for an event held in the elegant conference room that our Tina had convinced Cy Newhouse to furnish. The conference room also hosted regular round tables, which Tina skillfully used to promote the magazine’s brand: at them, New Yorker journalists asked questions to celebrities like Elton John or Lauren Hutton, and the magazine’s advertisers acted as the audience. The most notorious roundtable was one of the last involving Dick Morris, the former presidential adviser who had resigned as the Clinton administration's top strategist just a week earlier because of his affair with a prostitute. The walls of the conference room were decorated with portraits famous people and cartoons from the magazine. Portrait of the apathetic, seen-it-all Dorothy Parker, a member of the old " round tables” contrasted with a portrait of a bubbly Donald Trump hanging opposite, a typical subject of interest for the magazine of the Tina Brown era.

The shiny doors of the elevator connected, it hummed for a long time, and I felt pressure in the soles of my feet. I was preparing to enter the editorial office. In the thirty-one seconds (non-stop) climb to the sixteenth floor, one had to let go of oneself, to put aside the culture of the street for a while, in order to enter a world where the word “culture” was still synonymous with the words “politeness” and “education.” I pulled the headphones off my head, took off my cap and sunglasses, and smoothed my long hair, looking at the reflection in the shiny metal elevator door.

As a child, my idea of ​​what culture was was from The New Yorker, which sat on the coffee table at my parents' house in New Jersey, along with other middlebrow magazines such as Holiday, Life And Look. The culture the New Yorker presented was elitist, decorous, even elegant. Culture was an object of aspiration, while remaining democratic enough that anyone could have it, even if they didn't have a coffee table to put it on display. The use of the pronoun "we" in the magazine's editorials suggested the existence of some cultural center, a vantage point from which anyone could see what was important in the culture; and what he could not see did not seem very important. We were passionately interested in the so-called elite, canonical, or high culture, which consisted of the traditional arts of the aristocracy - painting, music, theater, ballet and literature. We were also interested in jazz, and we learned to appreciate the films of Pauline Kael and take television only half seriously thanks to Michael Arlen, but we cared little about rock 'n' roll, street style and youth culture. To maintain the authority of this "we"—which implied that the New Yorker's hierarchical distinctions and judgments were not elitist but universal—the magazine eventually had to distance itself from even more of the commercial culture. We might not like rap, but when it became part of the mainstream, we couldn't speak intelligently about it and ended up just staying away.

In the old New Yorker, every sentence was a maxim, paying as much attention to neighboring sentences as decorum required. The facts were presented one after another with virtually no embellishment. Flashy headlines, sophisticated writing, sociological jargon, academic theory—anything designed to attract attention or provoke controversy was scrupulously removed from New Yorker articles published without photographic illustrations. But more importantly, the text did not allow anything that could be called “newfangled.” A New Yorker subscriber could be confident that when he opened the magazine, he would experience the same feeling that an aristocrat would feel when entering a gentleman's club and leaving the crass consumer world at the door.

For more than a hundred years, this is how the concept of status functioned in America. You earned money in one or another commercial enterprise and then, in order to strengthen your position in society and isolate yourself from others, you developed a contempt for the cheap entertainment and traditional spectacles that made up mass culture. The old New Yorker fit this system perfectly, which is what made the magazine so attractive to advertisers. Just as Cadillac advertised the quietest car, and Patek Philip watches were the best of underrated luxury, the New Yorker offered readers a refined, decorous, and passively snobbish view of world events, happily freed from the screaming, shrieking carnival. beyond its pages.

There was a certain amount of falsehood in this approach, because The New Yorker was itself commercial enterprise. But much about the magazine's standards was admirable. The main source of the moral authority of The New Yorker was opposition to what led to the degradation of cultural life - advertising, thoughtless adherence to standards of "status", vulgar TV stars - and the exclusion from the texts that the magazine offered readers of everything that is now called Noise. In this, the magazine was one component of the higher moral authority of the classical tastemakers, who acted on the principle of Matthew Arnold: “To strive objectively to promote the best that exists in the world.”

The magazine's source of moral authority was the personal convictions of William Shawn, editor from 1951 to 1987. His editorial philosophy was expressed in a commentary published on April 22, 1985, shortly after Cy Newhouse bought The New Yorker for $168 million from Peter Fleischmann, whose father, Raoul, founded the magazine with Harold Ross in 1925. “We never published anything for commercial purposes,” Sean wrote, “or in order to create a sensation, earn a scandalous reputation, become popular or fashionable, successful.” These words are hard to believe now. Is this really possible to publish a magazine? Moreover, very “successful”?

In 1987, after five years of writing articles and reviews for various magazines, I sent samples of my work to Robert Gottlieb, who had succeeded Sean at the helm of The New Yorker. A week later Gottlieb called and invited me to a meeting.

Today that meeting in the old New Yorker building on Forty-third Street seems to me like a message from a distant time, vanished like the world of medieval gallant love. The offices in the old building were filled with worn sofas, scratched tables, stacks of dusty manuscripts and deeply ingrained dirt - this style expressed Sean's own attitude towards gloss and glamor. Some of those who came here for the first time, expecting to see something in line with their lofty expectations - a kind of middle-class prosperity consistent with the cultural policy of the magazine - were stunned and shocked by the squalid appearance of the editorial office. But this did not happen to me, because I also took the position “we are too cultured to pay attention to this.”