Culture is not an industry. It is not a sector of the economy. Culture is a condition. It is the social trailings of my solitary consciousness. I can no more keep myself from creating than I can keep myself from breathing. Culture can’t be mined or drilled or smelted or fired. If I shrink-wrap it and put it in a box … well, I might as well shrink-wrap my pet dog. I can try to possess it in that way, but I’ll end up with a corpse. My culture is a living breathing creature. Imagination at play. Prophecy in a rage. Grief in tears. You cannot colonize it. You cannot plant a flag in it and claim it in the name of anything. You must simply accept it, the same way you must accept that everything you think and do will end in dirt. Like a politician, or a captain of industry, you can greywash it, but it will come back with teeth.
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June 29th, 2010 at 3:01 am
I love art in many of its forms (although I admit that I sometimes cannot *fully appreciate it) including graffiti.
I must disagree, however, with your thoughts on what culture is. Last year, I had asked my Human Geography instructor what culture was. Her answer was trenchant: anything man-made. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was truth behind that definition. Is Elgar’s Cello Concerto culture? Yes. And Penderecki’s Polymorphia? Still, it is culture. But what is to be said of the tacky tourist traps I see everyday? Whether I like it or not, it is still some kind of culture, although it is a culture I’d rather not recognize. Your definition of culture cannot be bottled, because if it were to be contained, it would be transformed into something new; a new culture would arise. This same idea of recognizing culture relates to Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The tribe of Okonkwo most definitely has an established culture, but few want to realize that the white settlers also have their own culture. But this fact does not in any diminish the immense joy that I encounter when I experience a cultural experience like listening to Maslanka’s 6th or witnessing a bold statement made by an unyielding work of graffiti.