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Culture Quotes

“The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it - it's as immediate and as superficial as that.”

World Looks Art Culture Sound Mass Slave Bites Superficial Art World Sound Bites Mass Culture

Author:Matthew Collings

“Art has knowledge and skills, and to come to know them is to be implicitly against a culture that is against knowledge - today's mass culture, which aims to produce a lot of consuming morons.”

Knows Art Today Culture Produce Skills Mass Aim Consuming Moron Mass Culture

Author:Matthew Collings

“Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.”

“The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.”

Source: One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“Nothing threatens freedom of the personality and the meaning of life like war, poverty, terror. But there are also indirect and only slightly more remote dangers. One of these is the stupefaction of man (the "gray mass," to use the cynical term of bourgeois prognosticators) by mass culture with its intentional or commercially motivated lowering of intellectual level and content, with its stress on entertainment or utilitarianism, and with its carefully protective censorship.”

“Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.”

Culture Games Interest Mass Imperialism Reassuring Mass Culture American Imperialism

Book:Valences of the Dialectic

Source: Valences of the Dialectic

“At times, the biggest challenge in embracing simplicity will be the vague feeling of isolation that comes with it, since private sacrifice doesn't garner much attention in the frenetic world of mass culture.”

World Feelings Culture Challenges Attention Sacrifice Mass Simplicity Isolation Vague Mass Culture

Book:Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

Source: Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.”

Form Culture Mass Diets Steady Deprivation Popular Culture Mass Culture

Book:For Keeps

Source: For Keeps

“Those who know New York City primarily through tourism or mass culture may think of us natives as possessing certain shared characteristics, not all of them flattering. But the true, volatile charisma of New York lies in how balkanised it is.”

Thinking Knows May Lying Certain Culture Cities New York Mass Characteristics New York City Tourism Possessing Flattering Charisma Mass Culture

Author:Jonathan Dee

“Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”

Matter Problem Age Culture Answers Modern Century Mass Camps Elites Detachment Nineteenth Century Prerogative Surrogates Dandy Mass Culture Dandyism

Book:A Susan Sontag reader

Source: A Susan Sontag reader