Zing!
This is the bitchy, badly-kept secret of American culture, which everyone knows but we’re supposed to be too polite to mention in public (and anyone who really thinks that obviously doesn’t know much about Americans): wherever there’s money to be made, that’s where “culture” will go. Because there is no culture in America, not really. There is only media, and media is always drawn to money.
George
Kira
April 28th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
It’s a cute line, but it reminds me of people who say everything starts in big cities like New York and London. Nope. That’s where things go to die: they start on college campuses and in high schools, in places like Minneapolis and Seattle, and when the kids move on, they’re noticed in the big cities.
The reason that feels true is because it ends right: media is always drawn to money. It’s why Hollywood can only be called “liberal” by extreme conservatives.
April 28th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
So, do you think there is a uniquely American culture that can be distinguished from “media”?
I see lots of micro-cultures producing all kinds of art, much of which will interact within the clique with philosophy and politics, and what have you, but not anything that functions as a societal context, or that fosters these interactions at the pan-American level, the way “culture” does in older societies.
Partly I think this is down to the only real American mass culture being “pop culture” which is implicitly co-opted by both a very short fashion cycle and the engulf-commoditize-regurgitate media cycle.
I’m hoping you will give me a pithy counterexample that will shut down that whole line of thinking, though.
April 29th, 2008 at 11:21 pm
“Culture” is far too squishy a concept for such definite statements, I think. See, in your comment you used it three different ways: As a stand-in for shared communications (media), as a stand-in for art we produce, as a stand-in for the shared shorthand we assume everyone knows when we communicate….
April 30th, 2008 at 12:44 am
I think I’m failing to communicate, not failing to think, but let me try again, and we’ll see. I think I’m using a definition that incorporates several of those things.
If culture is defined as “the societal discussion”, with the widest possible meaning of discussion–something like what I would mean if I said that the history of Western philosophy can be viewed as a discussion over hundreds of years, except extended to all areas of human endeavour–then I think it would follow that art would arise from this, either in direct reaction to it, or in the attempt to extend it (or escape it, which effectively just extends it), and that it would serve as a context for understanding and evaluating aesthetics and ideas. I don’t know if there’s a dictionary that defines it this way, but it’s pretty close to “all the knowledge and values shared by a society” or “patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance”.
I think I can manipulate that symbol in my head, although apparently I need to work at expressing it.
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm
I quite like your definition of culture, but in that case does art necessarily have the pre-eminent value in describing or marking the discussion? I think most art is not Art, in the sense of being made explicitly to express an idea. That’s what we have the internerd for, these days. And much Art is not very good, and/or is self-ruminating wankery.
On the other hand, if the original quote is to be interpreted as turning on the different readings of the word “culture”, maybe it’s not as squishy as I originally thought. Here’s Shakespeare doing the same thing with “state”:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Well, doesn’t that depend on your definition of art?
Damn, Old Billy could write.
May 9th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Found this in one of my University’s publications, describing the history of what eventually became our integrated Civilization courses:
These students would all be concerned with a traditional way of life that had maintained a distinguishing character over a long time, to great consequence for mankind. A literate people expresses its traditional way of life in what is written; and every people expresses it in institutions and customs and everyday behavior. Ultimately the conception of culture as a naturally developed round of life and the conception of culture as enlightenment through mental and moral training, go back to the same reality: a people with a way of life that is or can be a subject of reflective study. The regional program of research may take the form of long study of the great world cultures.
— Robert Redfield, Dean of History, 1944
Thought you’d like that.
May 9th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
I should think I would like to have take a class from, or spend an hour down the pub with, Dr. Redfield.
July 31st, 2008 at 12:28 pm
“I see lots of micro-cultures producing all kinds of art, much of which will interact within the clique with philosophy and politics, and what have you, but not anything that functions as a societal context, or that fosters these interactions at the pan-American level, the way “culture” does in older societies.”
THAT is American culture. Try and find a majority of Americans that agree on much of any type of scoietal norm.