Un recueil des écrits les plus marquants de la critique culturelle de Philippa Snow, articulant avec une précision magistrale le lien épineux et indéfectible entre les médias de masse, la culture populaire et l'art.
Snow Business marks Philippa Snow's emergence as one of the twenty-first century's greatest cultural critics. From the 2000s into the 2010s, reality television and "second-screen media," designed to play in the background while we look at phones, have proliferated, inaugurating the dumbient age. Celebrities have never been more ordinary; there have never been so many ordinary people who are celebrities.
A collection of her writing from the last half-decade, Snow Business articulates with majestic precision the thorny, unbreakable bond between mass media, popular culture and art. The memoirs of Pamela Anderson and the Kardashian sisters are just as worthy exemplars of "autofiction" as the writing of Olivia Laing and Annie Ernaux; Spring Breakers has succeeded in updating The Great Gatsby; and we are still afraid of Francis Bacon.
Snow has no interest in distinctions of high and low culture. If masterpieces of fiction, painting and cinema reflect back to us some vital and mysterious part of ourselves, mass-distributed popular culture does the same thing, and often with greater clarity and violence—if we are only brave enough to look. Fortunately, Snow does the looking for us.
Alongside her essays are also works of fiction, vignettes whose protagonists are actors, singers, child stars. These are strange, sometimes conspiratorial, and often nightmarish. Just as Snow Business can describe culture with stunning clarity, it can inhabit culture's moving parts, making it again something indescribable, a sensuous vision, a complete fever dream.
Philippa Snow est une écrivaine dont le travail a redéfini la critique contemporaine grâce à son analyse de la culture populaire, de l'art et des médias. Ses textes sont régulièrement publiés dans la Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, The New Republic, The Nation, The White Review et le Financial Times. Elle est l'auteur de Which As You Know Means Violence (Repeater, 2022), Trophy Lives (Mack, 2024) et It's Terrible the Things I Have to Do to Be Me (Virago, 2025). A travers son examen approfondi de la télé-réalité, de la culture de la célébrité et du grand art, Philippa Snow met en lumière les frontières de plus en plus floues entre le divertissement populaire et l'expression artistique au XXIe siècle.
