Hal Foster

“Design is all about desire, but strangely this desire seems almost subject-less today, or at least lack-less; that is, design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all image and no interiority - an apotheosis of the subject that is also its disappearance. Poor little rich man: he is 'precluded from all fuure living and striving, developing and desiring' in the neo-Art Nouveau world of total design and Internet plenitude. ”

“For Seabrook this 'nobrow' state - where the old brow distinctions no longer seem to apply - is not only a dumbing down of intellectual culture; it is also a wising up to commercial culture, which is no longer seen as an object of disdain but as 'a source of status.' At the same time this child of the elite is ambivalent about the collapse of brow distinctions, caught as he is between the old world of middlebrow taste, as vetted by The New Yorker of yore, and the new world of nobrow taste, where culture and marketing are one. ”