When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow

When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow PDF Author: Peter Swirski
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349951684
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
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.

When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow

When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow PDF Author: Peter Swirski
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349951684
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Highbrow/Lowbrow

Highbrow/Lowbrow PDF Author: Lawrence W. LEVINE
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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.

High Brow Meets Low Brow

High Brow Meets Low Brow PDF Author: Rob Kroes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Verzameling essays die een beeld geven van de wijze waarop de 20e eeuwse Amerikaanse intelligentsia tegen hun eigen (massa)cultuur aankijkt

Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable

Highbrow, Lowbrow, Brilliant, Despicable PDF Author: The Editors of New York Magazine
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501166840
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
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.

When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow

When Highbrow Meets Lowbrow PDF Author: Peter Swirski
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137597724
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

From Lowbrow to Nobrow

From Lowbrow to Nobrow PDF Author: Peter Swirski
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773573240
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

Weirdo Deluxe

Weirdo Deluxe PDF Author: Matt Dukes Jordan
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780811842419
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
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.

Nazisploitation!

Nazisploitation! PDF Author: Daniel H. Magilow
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441183590
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
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

Nobrow

Nobrow PDF Author: John Seabrook
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375704515
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
From John Seabrook, one of our most incisive and amusing cultural critics, comes Nobrow, a fascinatingly original look at the radical convergence of marketing and culture. In the old days, highbrow was elite and unique and lowbrow was commercial and mass-produced. Those distinctions have been eradicated by a new cultural landscape where “good” means popular, where artists show their work at K-Mart, Titantic becomes a bestselling classical album, and Roseanne Barr guest edits The New Yorker: in short, a culture of Nobrow. Combining social commentary, memoir, and profiles of the potentates and purveyors of pop culture–entertainment mogul David Geffen, MTV President Judy McGrath, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Nobrow high-priest George Lucas, and others–Seabrook offers an enthralling look at our breakneck society where culture is ruled by the unpredictable Buzz and where even aesthetic worth is measured by units shipped.

Playing in the Dark

Playing in the Dark PDF Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307388638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.