I have two dear friends, both of them accomplished scholars of film theory and philosophy, both professors at prominent American universities. They also happen to be married to one another.

The only odd fact about their academic life is that they both happen to teach (for mainly legal reasons, only to graduates) texts such as Valley of the Dolls and Hustler magazine, vintage exploitation movies, films such as Deep Throat, and industrial and anti-drug propaganda documentaries.

This is unprecedented teaching fare for any university in the history of the world. Surely what has been referred to as "a people's art" by some and as "trash" by others has never been examined in any serious way by learning institutions. Thus TV shows, pornography, cartoons, pulp novels, quilts, etc., have traditionally been excluded from their curricula, or when recognized as worthy of examination, been heavily censored.

Thomas Jefferson, represented as a freethinking fellow by both historians and the media, disapproved of the early novels, thinking the then-infant genre a bad influence on society. Of course, works in the medium at that time included such erotically tinged titles as Tom Jones, Clarissa and Pamela.

I have the utmost respect for my representative professor couple, who teach their subjects with an intellectual rigor normally reserved for Joyce and Milton, or in the field of cinema, Citizen Kane and It Happened One Night. Needless to say, their academic project is quite a contentious one, earning the wrath of parents' groups and older faculty who espouse a more traditional canon.

In Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing—The Marketing of Culture, John Seabrook writes about pop culture in a fashion normally reserved for examinations of history or historical movements. Only in this case, Seabrook's subjects are mediocre techno bands and clubs, pop singers of the moment, media moguls like David Geffen, and George Lucas' popular Star Wars series.

Seabrook is a comrade-in-arms of Tina Brown's revamped New Yorker. Gossipy and chatty to a fault, he merges the classic New Yorker ideology of what good writing is—erudite yet succinct, concrete rather than abstract, Anglo-American rather than Continental, minimal, not maxinimal, and so on—with the sort of new cultural theory informed by the Cultural Studies movement, a tradition which gave direct birth to the teachings of my aforementioned academic friends.

In the chapter titled "My Father's Closets," we read some of Seabrook's best writing. Part familial and sartorial memoir, he both celebrates and criticizes his father's dandyism, an anachronistic and arduous project by today's standards. (Only a handful of people care about classic style anymore. When two of the most traditional and acclaimed law firms in the country—Boston's Ropes & Gray, and Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault—go casual week (nevermind Friday), you can almost be sure that both suits and jacket-and-trouser combinations have gone the way of typewriters and buggy whips!)

According to Seabrook, his dad was one of the great dressers of his time. Like Fred Astaire or Cary Grant in the past or Tom Wolfe today, he carried on quite a tradition of men's dress. As Seabrook rapturously takes inventory of his dad's closet—woven neckwear of "every conceivable hue," "white linen suits for the summer before central air," and custom-made Savile Row suits in many different styles such as sack, drape and so on, one would think that Junior loves Dad's clothes and would be willing to carry on the tradition. Not so. In the essay's opening his father has just come home from the hospital and put on a Savile Row double-breasted, chalk-striped suit. Dad is not amused by his son's Chemical Brothers T-shirt. To his father, legible clothing is just bad clothing, and a slogan for Chemical Brothers is no different than Nike's infamous "Just Do It!" The fact is, while other T-shirts might be tacky and plebeian, in this case the son's T-shirt is hip, ironic and creative, a nuance lost on the father.

This nuance brings us to the crux of Seabrook's essays. Influenced by Raymond Williams, the great Marxist cultural theorist (who became a sort of spiritual father to the British Cultural Studies movement in literary criticism), Seabrook develops what he thinks is a startling thesis in the canon of Marxist analysis. The old taxonomy of high, middle and low used to describe cultural works is no longer valid, and Late Capitalism has ushered in an ironic egalitarianism. This has resulted in a gleeful free-for-all where people can explore everything, and some works have such a broad appeal as to combine avant-garde influences with the popular:

"True, there was a big bad market that could practice censorship on artists, but there was also an ever-multiplying grid of small niche markets for artists to support themselves—a condition that was good for the arts if not necessarily good for the artists. As the mainstream had become ever more homogeneous, the fringe had become ever richer in cultural offerings. There were off-off-Broadway one-acts, cutting edge zines, genre-busting bands, small films that fell between genres and cut across boundaries, rappers who had an original flava and a story to tell."

The problem is, none of Seabrook's examples really focuses on any of these works. He exalts such artforms of dubious value as techno raves and white rap. When his parents ask what new plays, Broadway shows or concerts he has seen, he confesses to the reader that he prefers all-night raves and listening to rather mediocre bands on his Discman. He is certainly entitled to his preferences, but he also just might be ignoring some good work.

Like Seabrook, I consider myself an egalitarian when it comes to identifying what is art. Following in the footsteps of Raymond Williams and (especially) Camille Paglia, for me it is all art—from Charlie's Angels and porno to the Sistine Chapel. However, an important qualification is required when making this assertion: It may be all art, but it is not all good. I use the word art in the same sense as Paglia (see Paglia's Sex, Art and American Culture), in much the same way as the word "person" is used. Person—or human being—is a broad category that includes both Charles Manson and the Dalai Lama. Likewise, in art some works are more interesting than others—richer, more rewarding, more complex.

Another problem is that the old taxonomies—high, low and middle—are dubious. As a result, Seabrook's new taxonomies—identity subculture and mainstream culture—are equally dubious, based on flawed research, so to speak. Creative people do what they do, then marketers manipulate demographics, and finally, certain folks see or read certain things and not others. This process combines all three stages and, related though the stages may be, they do not always form a seamless whole. Seabrook, however, does not separate them. In fact, he is consumed by gossipy, chatty accounts of media marketers, promoters, producers and agents as would befit his view that these managers are artists of a kind. Just as Seabrook cannot see his father's clothes as works of beauty in their own right but rather as symbols of status and power, he also cannot imagine that many works have a (partially) independent existence from the vagaries of critical fashion or popular perception.

Seabrook believes that works of art are wedded only to the specific context of various subcultures and identities, balkanized as it were. While he is very bright about cultural theory, he never really closely reads a work itself. There is more to a work of art than the shared identity and experience of the consumers who use it to partially define themselves. For example, although the mainstream movie The First Wives'Club was marketed to boomer females, it has a life of its own, and any male can and should be able to approach it and glean something from it. A 70-year-old friend of mine was cautioned by his daughter not to see Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy. Why not? Must he be confined to viewing films like Tea with Mussolini? Is he in the wrong demographic? Is the language of Smith's film too crude or youth-oriented? The old cliché about Chekhov having relevance for a black female in Harlem is quite true.

Always the sociologist, Seabrook is interested only in the production process of the work and its subsequent marketing. When he does examine a work, his comparisons are laughable (e.g., he compares the beat of techno rhythm to a sonnet). His mistake is the fun house mirror reflection of the older, elitist critics. Whereas they were exclusive to a fault and engaged in untenable, often arbitrary hierarchies, Seabrook indulges in a thoughtless inclusiveness. One of the important chapters of the book is a puff piece on George Lucas. If there is one medium where popular culture and high art are coming together, it is the cinema. Younger auteurs Harmony Korine, Sofia Coppola, Darren Arnofsky, etc., practice what I think Seabrook defines. Lucas does not. Too middle brow to be an exploitation filmmaker, too dumb to be high art, in the last analysis, Lucas is simply a classic Hollywood director cranking out very ordinary fare. His Star Wars series and other offerings, while well made enough, are not cultural touchstones, but rather functional, safe movies for a mainstream audience.

Music is Seabrook's biggest insensitivity. The current rave phenomenon does not seem a very exciting or edifying one. Rehashed 1960s emotional expressions without any transcendent social meaning do not make for especially good music. An overly hyped but watered-down version of '70s disco, techno music does nothing to promote or exalt good musicianship; rather, it gives center stage to DJ's and other folks of dubious talent. While disco was played on real instruments by real musicians—often of the highest caliber—techno is largely synthesized and artificial.

Worse yet is the obsession with ecstasy, a drug rampant at any rave event. Said to help the "heart chakra," ecstasy actually serves to dull any sense of human discrimination. Indiscriminately loving feelings are not the best antidote to a culture weaned on Oprah, action movies and pop psychology. If people wish to take a shortcut by loving their neighbor through chemicals, I would prefer to avoid such people. In my estimation, ecstasy is the worst of all controlled drugs—like LSD, it has an ideology and an agenda, which makes it a very pretentious drug indeed.

Seabrook does mention the enormous creativity found among the young, but he never stands still long enough to examine individual works. His is a world-weary hipness and coolness that alternates between celebrating the simple pleasures of popular culture and delving into the complex pleasures of more alternative culture. But ultimately, Nobrow is an account of "The Way We Live Now," partly from the inside, partly from the outside as a reporter. As such—like so much American non-fiction—it is never the book it should or could be. Not philosophical or reflexive enough, Nobrow never scratches past the surface of the larger capitalist forces it purports to analyze. Enamored with anecdote, biography and the personal touch, the book never really gets around to explaining anything, least of all what "nobrow" really is—a cute, clever but ultimately inadequate term.

Seabrook certainly knows his pop culture: he traces the history of gangsta rap quite eloquently, for instance. But jazz is absent from his book, as is more alternative rock beyond Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain. Where is Ani DiFranco? Or Tori Amos? Or the Lilith Fair? It seems as if what matters most to him is what most people consume. But much is missing from his book: important artists and works that are popular yet somewhat more of a minority taste. Is Seabrook suspicious of anything that more elitist critics might like? Is that why jazz or alternative and independent films are excluded?

Perhaps he spends so many pages tracing the lives of David Geffen and George Lucas because, like a good Marxist, he wants to focus on the means and mode of production in today's world. Clearly web cams, MTV, hypertext and the like have caused a concomitant change in culture. We sorely need a book that examines individual works, whether popular or not. Nobrow is certainly not that book. In the end, Nobrow is a no-brainer.