How important is it for you to be 'cultured?'

How important is it for you to be 'cultured?'

What does this mean to you?

And do you consider yourself cultured?


There are many Europeans who feel that Americans are uncultured dumb oafs. I argue that is just not true----most Americans are very cultured which is why we keep guns in our beds and kiss them before we go to sleep, and while you can find all kinds of stupid recipes in your fancy cook books, only the finest of cuisines are kept very secret, and most American fast food restaurants keep their recipes very secret. Yeah! Try making a Big Mac in your Michelin Five Star restaurant----it can't be done!

OK---EVERYTHING I wrote after what many Europeans think of Americans is a joke!

By the strictest definition, to be cultured is to be... "characterized by refined taste, manners, and good education."

But clearly how such things are defined are determined by the culture that one is cultured in. For example, I would consider many of my native friends who follow the Red Road, i.e. the traditional Native traditions to be very cultured, even if some of them are not as highly educated in terms of Western education, for they are very educated in terms of Non-Western traditional Native knowledge, for example in such things as cosmology and spirituality.

Traditionally in Western society, it was members of the aristocracy that were cultured, yet in dealing with anyone they deemed as below their station in life, they treated them with the illest of manners.

 

Can I be polite? Yes, certainly. However, I consider myself about as cultured as a hot pocket.

 

Don't sell yourself short. Here you are in the Arts section of HipForums! And didn't you recently do a post on a musical artist? Music is culture as well. And then of course----you are here on HipForums---that's got to be worth a lot of points in the cultured scale. (Sorry----I meant to post that sooner---but it has been a very busy Thanksgiving for me.)

So go ahead----go out there today and say something pompous and implicitly demeaning to someone (possibly even racist)... I'M JOKING!! Demeaning and covertly racist comments and observations do not really show the world that you are cultured. Unless you are in an art museum... NO! THAT'S A JOKE TOO!

Seriously though, I think being cultured is a choice. I think a lot of people think that it is a class thing or that they need to have money to become cultured. But really---how expensive is an artsy coffee table book on sale at a Barne's & Noble? I say, if they cant afford to read paperback books, let them read hardback coffee table books! (Ok, again back to being serious---not very expensive. I know because all too often I have gone to a Barnes & Noble and come out with many books I had no intention of buying, and on subjects I had no intention of seeking out, but could not pass up the discounted price, as they sat on a table near the cash registers) I haven't been to a Barne's & Noble for a while---I hope they are still doing that!

I don't know anyone with a soul that cannot find something in art, music, or other art form, that does not speak out to them. I think that having a passion for something, and indulging it is the path to becoming cultured.

 

Don't sell yourself short. Here you are in the Arts section of HipForums! And didn't you recently do a post on a musical artist? Music is culture as well. And then of course----you are here on HipForums---that's got to be worth a lot of points in the cultured scale. (Sorry----I meant to post that sooner---but it has been a very busy Thanksgiving for me.)

So go ahead----go out there today and say something pompous and implicitly demeaning to someone (possibly even racist)... I'M JOKING!! Demeaning and covertly racist comments and observations do not really show the world that you are cultured. Unless you are in an art museum... NO! THAT'S A JOKE TOO!

Seriously though, I think being cultured is a choice. I think a lot of people think that it is a class thing or that they need to have money to become cultured. But really---how expensive is an artsy coffee table book on sale at a Barne's & Noble? I say, if they cant afford to read paperback books, let them read hardback coffee table books! (Ok, again back to being serious---not very expensive. I know because all too often I have gone to a Barnes & Noble and come out with many books I had no intention of buying, and on subjects I had no intention of seeking out, but could not pass up the discounted price, as they sat on a table near the cash registers) I haven't been to a Barne's & Noble for a while---I hope they are still doing that!

I don't know anyone with a soul that cannot find something in art, music, or other art form, that does not speak out to them. I think that having a passion for something, and indulging it is the path to becoming cultured.

 

I find it interesting that there are so many large homes in very nice neighborhoods, and the walls are blank, except for some family photos.

There are so many ways to acquire real art at very affordable prices. I'm not talking about the kind of art you get in a poster shop, i.e. mass produced kitsch (However many poster shops do sell original pieces by local artists, and what not---so yes, that would be actual art.)

Go into an antique shop or antique mall and you are sure to find prints, and all kinds of other pieces of art at relatively low prices. We recently found an antique lithograph of Ruben's painting of his two sons for $50. It is very likely worth $1500 - 2000 (though it is a bit faded due to age).

But even more impressive--- my wife found a beautiful oil painting on Face Book Market place. It was a commissioned reproduction of a painting by another artist, who's work, in turn, was inspired by the Dutch Masters and other continental pieces. The artist who painted it was a master artist in her own right and has had various pieces sold at a number of auctions. It is a beautiful piece of a woman holding a love letter in her bedroom, which could have easily been done by one of the Dutch masters in the 1600's -1700's such as Vermeer. With a beautiful frame, it is about 4' tall. The amazing thing, this piece cost us only $275!

 

Being 'cultured' in my opinion should be for the sake of Fun, you should view people of all backgrounds as having something to offer because of their unique backgrounds and where they come from. If you're going to be 'cultured' in the egotistical sense, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Do it like you're learning about the learning channel and you'll go far and you'll attract a lot of people along the way.

 

Here's some american culture for you. Of course most of these folks spend their off time at libraries, museums, fashion shows, etc.

 

And a little more.

 

Excuse me--I have a poetry reading to go to.

 

Exactly.

I think that if you are doing it for egotistical reasons, you aren't authentically cultured. This goes for racism too. Perhaps in our colonial past racism and an egotistical arrogance were permissible, mainly because being cultured was an aristocratic phenomena. But today, to be cultured is to be, what the MAGA crowd fears----woke.

This is because it is to be educated, inquisitive, and accepting. A racist xenophobe with a closed mind is the antithesis of a cultured individual, even if they are smart, have an advanced degree, and/or have a lot of money.

 

I'm on board with the person who said they are as cultured as a hot pocket. : )

Even though I was born and raised in NYC and have been exposed to a lot of different cultures, foods, and points of view, I still don't consider myself cultured.

I always thought those types drove around and exchanged Grey Poupon between cars, lol.

 

And like I said before----don't sell yourself short! You can't be an aspiring writer if you are uncultured. And I read your introduction on your information page---you sound plenty cultured to me.

The pompous jerks who share grey poupon between the backs of limos only think they are cultured. Now if they were sharing Red Rascasse Bouillabaisse that they had personally just brought home from Marseille, then they would be cultured. And I'm sure even you would turn down a grey poupon and ask instead for a Bouillabaisse made with Red Rascasse that was prepared in Marseille, am I right?

No, no, no! Again---the days of culture being restricted to the aristocracy is lost to our Colonial past. Money and class do not buy culture. We are all free to pursue it today.

Writing itself is an art, and therefore a part of culture.

 

I joke about the old defining characteristics of culture, such as the pompous tight-lipped member of the elite, who sees everyone below his station as dirty peasants, characteristics which still seem to define culture for us today.

And I'm with Scratcho in joking about the hillbilly side of American culture. But I am very serious that the old notions of being cultured as aristocratic or elitist no longer apply, and they haven't applied for quite some time.

The French Philosopher (You can't get any more cultured than a French Philosopher), Baudrillard, pointed out that art and culture used to be something that could only be enjoyed by the very wealthy. Peasants could not afford art, nor could they even have a place to enjoy it, except perhaps for the church to some degree. (Churches in Europe are still filled with artistic treasures.) I will add that even writing, as I mentioned in my last post, was done primarily by people of the leisure class if we go back a few centuries. In order to write, you generally needed to be well enough off that you could find time to do that. He then went on to point out that such is no longer the case. He had a lot to say about this, being critical of modern art trends and post-modernism. He wrote, "Today art only turns banality into artistic truth."

Baudrillard feared, and with good reason, that our culture, and even our reality itself, is turning into a simulacra---a copy, a simulation---mass produced for the masses. We are losing authenticity to a world of hyper-nihilism. Our analog reality that we experience with our own senses is being replaced by a digital one, and look how so many of us escape into a virtual reality care of PlayStation and XBox. Baudrillard died in 2007, and thus did not even see how right he was, as we careen towards a world run by AI, and even the compassionate human facets of our government (e.g. our social safety nets) are being replaced by cold objectivist corporations, run by numbers, that will exploit us by commodifying all that we need----especially if Trump has his way.

At the same time, while I agree with Baudrillard in many ways, I think that such factors as the rise of general affluence and the democratization of art and culture can be a dynamic of liberation. We could say that the anti-culture that began with such movements as dadaism and that eventually culminated in the counterculture movement of the 60's and 70's was in a sense a revolution serving to destroy the old cultural order of colonialism. Unfortunately, on the other side of the revolution, subject to the forces of post-modern decline and the impact of late stage capitalism, all in the face of technological progress moving faster than man's ability to understand its implications, we see ourselves facing a potential collapse into a Baudrillardian nightmare.

So here we are. Culture has been liberated for the masses to enjoy. So what do we do with it? Let it be soured by consumerism, spoiled by the greed of an ungrateful and undeserving wealthy elite, and then have the last fragments of it destroyed by an increasingly stupid horde of people who are willingly turning over all their freedoms to an authoritarian idiocracy (To be exact, I would call it a----a patho-idiokakistocracy---as a pathocracy is a nation run by pathologically deranged people, and a kakistocracy is one run by leaders that are kaka). Already, AI is beginning to take over the acts of human creation. Even art ownership itself is losing all implicit meaning as the rights of ownership of individual pieces of art are being broken into tradable securities---ETF's---while the art itself is crated up and stored in a warehouse--never to be seen again--converted from a creation of beauty and meaning to a mere asset backing a piece of paper.

What a waste that would be. It takes away a big part of our very humanity. It destroys the very thing that we create to give meaning to our world; to separate us from lower life forms. To make sense of who we are.

Therefore, I would argue that we actually have a duty to our humanity to become cultured!

 

They knew the score!

 

And for anyone, like the younger ones among us, who did not recognize MeAgain's Simon & Garfunkel's reference, here it is. I suspect they were influenced by the great Leftist writer, Herbert Marcuse, for this one. His book, One Dimensional Man, shaped much of the political thought of the 60's.




And of course, that song referenced:




Part of Marcuse's argument was that if the establishment controls the narrative, then they also control how we rebel, and while we may think we are being radical, we are in fact, just serving the goals of the establishment. The establishment therefore seeks to control the narrative. An example of this that I have used, Drink Dr. Pepper and be a pepper, if you want to stand out and rebel. In more modern terms we would say that the Establishment appropriates the memes of the rebellious to control the rebellious.