By examining the underpinnings of this dichotomy, he proposes nobrow as an analytic, pragmatic, and cultural category which describes a new type of literary work named artertainment. While John Seabrook in his recent work Nobrow: the Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (2000) regards nobrow as a contemporary phenomenon, Swirski argues that the diffusion in fact happens much earlier, during the early decades of the twentieth century. Today, Peter Swirski's From Lowbrow to Nobrow offers a fascinatingly original look at the subsequent fusing of these two planes into the "nobrow" territory, where the distinction of the two no longer suffices. The term "highbrow" was first coined in the 1880s to describe works of aesthetic superiority whereas "lowbrow" appeared after the turn of the twentieth century to denote someone or something that is neither "highly intellectual" nor "aesthetically refined." Shortly after the birth of this brow division, Van Wyck Brooks, in "America's Coming-of-Age," (1915) placed American literature onto "two irreconcilable planes, the plane of stark intellectuality and the plane of stark business." He maintains that there is "no genial middle ground" that could fill the cultural chasm between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" art. Such classification soon began to place the different kinds of art and literature into two main categories: highbrow and lowbrow. Numerous articles and reviews have been devoted to what should be canonized and what not in order to gain a place on library bookshelves. The debate on what is a good work of art has been going on for centuries. Lowbrow, Highbrow, and the Categorization of Art Selina Lai
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