no-brow

• nobrow

Blend of no +‎ lowbrow. Popularized by writer John Seabrook in Nobrow: the culture of marketing, the marketing of culture (2000).

no-brow (comparative more no-brow, superlative most no-brow)

1. Completely devoid of cultural or educational value.
   • 2008 April 15, Daniel Martin, “How will Battlestar Galactica end?”, in The Guardian‎:

     From no-brow beginnings, when BSG [Battlestar Galactica] still had to prove it had outwitted the shonky source material, the show gained cult respect and a few more viewers by the second year.

   • 2010, Roger Chapman, editor, Culture Wars […] , page 325:

     During the 2000s, belles-lettres accounted for less than 3 percent of all literature sold in the United States, and popular literature made gains in prestige and legitimacy, spawning a no-brow culture.

   • 2013, Carol Stabile, Prime Time Animation:

     The tremendous concern and fascination with South Park's “no-brow” humor (Wild 1998: 32) has largely deflected attention away from an equally interesting and significant factor in the show's history and status as a cultural artifact.

2. Located outside the traditional taste hierarchy, blending highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow.
   • 2005, Chris Turner, Planet Simpson […] , Ebury Press, →ISBN, page 140:

     The Simpsons is pure Nobrow, able to slide as effortlessly as Bob himself from slide-whistling slapstick to talk of Susan Sontag, and ultimately oblivious to any prejudicial classifications. It's not such much that lowbrow bludgeoned highbrow to death with a dozen rakes; it's that both of them have been subsumed into the one-stop-shopping megamall of pop.

• lowbrow
• middlebrow
• highbrow