The Art of Artertainment:
Nobrow, American Style

Many of our current cultural practices are marked by a union of art and entertainment. Underlined by all-pervasive processes of globalization and digitalization, this union comes in all shapes and sizes, transforming culture so that it can no longer be comfortably classified as high or low, art or genre. Surprisingly, this ‘art of artertainment’ has not, as yet, attracted much scholarly interest. It is with the aim of overcoming this omission that we launch this call for papers.

As editors of a collection titled The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style, we warmly invite articles that focus on all aspects of American culture, such as literature, television, cinema, music, painting, material culture, photography, theater, and all other that are influenced by the crossovers of highbrow with lowbrow. Of special interest are historical and/or analytical approaches illuminated by colorful studies of cases where art and entertainment come together, written from the perspective of aesthetics, history, sociology, anthropology, art history, communications, digital culture, and the like.

Please send an abstract of minimum 400 words along with a biographical note to both editors, Peter Swirski, Distinguished Professor of American Studies and American Literature (peter.swirski@ualberta.ca) and Iris Vidmar, Senior Researcher in the Analytic Philosophy of Art and Literature (ividmar@ffri.hr). To coin a slogan, we are looking for highbrow content and reader-friendly, lowbrow style. The deadline for the abstract submission is 1st September, 2017, but feel free to approach us any time.