culture
For all its good intentions, art that tries to minister to its audience by showcasing moral aspirants and paragons or the abject victims of political oppression produces smug, tiresome works that are failures both as art and as agitprop. Artists and critics—their laurel bearers—should take heed.
Anastasia Berg • On the Aesthetic Turn | The Point Magazine
How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain,... See more
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Girard believes that this concept permeates every aspect of society. “Enlightenment concepts of the individual persist all the way into existentialist thought,” he argues. In espousing equality between all men, the Enlightenment propagated the belief that the individual should not be subsumed to another. Indeed, the individual should not be... See more
Leo Nasskau • René Girard, mimetic desire, and society's biggest rat race
What’s the definition of culture? Culture is what we do to make our survival normal.
Content will be commoditized by AI—but content isn’t culture
From Hamish McKenzie
... See moreThis same surge in AI-led content production will simultaneously fuel a tremendous need for cultural connection: real humans in communion with one another. These relationships help us make sense of the world, and to know where to direct our attention. Their value will