What happens when the old elite distinctions - distinctions of caste as much as of taste - between highbrow and lowbrow no longer apply? When artists show at K-Mart, museums are filled with TV screens, and the brand on a shirt is more important than its cut? Welcome to the world of Nobrow: the ground zero where marketing and culture converge. Here the old lines of taste and class collapse: good equals hot, excellent means entertaining, and celebrity defines quality. It's a world where the product may be trash but the marketing can be art and no-one, not even the people who created both, can really tell the difference. Hip, provocative and superbly entertaining, Nobrow is an autobiographical journey through a tectonic shift in American cultural life by one of that country's sharpest observers. From the arrival of Tina Brown at the New Yorker - both emblem and engine of the change Seabrook describes - through the worlds of fashion and art, music and film, writing and commerce, Nobrow offers, like McLuhan's Understanding Media or Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, an essential roadmap to the universe we all now inhabit.