Popular Culture

(160 votes)   Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

Matthew Arnold
1822-1888, British Poet, Critic

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(145 votes)   Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.

Camille Paglia
1947-, American Author, Critic, Educator

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(132 votes)   Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio -- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how -- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home -- within the family, so to speak -- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.

Daniel J. Boorstin
1914-, American Historian

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(126 votes)   Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of ''quaint,'' and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.

Northrop Frye
1912-1991, Canadian Literary Critic

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(122 votes)   High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

Milan Kundera
1929-, Czech Author, Critic

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(119 votes)   There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.

Charles Krauthammer

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(117 votes)   The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

George Steiner
1929-, French-born American Critic, Novelist

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(108 votes)   If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.

Pablo Picasso
1881-1973, Spanish Artist

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(106 votes)   One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
1749-1832, German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist

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(96 votes)   If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator -- the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.

Herbert Marcuse
1898-1979, German Political Philosopher

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(91 votes)   Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

Walter Lippmann
1889-1974, American Journalist

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(87 votes)   Culture is one thing and varnish is another.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(85 votes)   Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.

Henry Van Dyke
1852--1933, American Protestant Clergyman and Writer

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(77 votes)   In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.

T. S. Eliot
1888-1965, American-born British Poet, Critic

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(74 votes)   Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

Edith Wharton
1862-1937, American Author

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