wtf is culture?

I began to think that the role of a critic is also a relational one: If someone has spent years of their life on a work, they deserve a serious, sustained response. Critics who write such reviews aren’t just offering something to the maker of a work but to the world. Look here , a critic says. Imagine what culture could be like — if there was more... See more

For sociologist Georg Simmel, culture is “the development of human nature beyond its natural state.”

Following philosopher David Lewis, conventions are (1) regular (2) well-known, and (3) socially accepted behaviors that individuals follow and expect others to follow.

Conventions start as coordination problem solutions but are quick to become social norms. And as everyone follows them to some degree, they create the behavioral patterns we associate with those groups.

But a critic, Nguyen implies, is not the man in the Ivory Tower damning or sanctifying specific works of literature based on his own taste: instead, criticism “comes from a deep fascination with the medium (literature, art, fashion, design, architecture, &c) and an overwhelming urge to discuss it, as deeply and as rigorously as possible, in... See more

In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers. While this shift has lowered many cultural barriers to entry, since anyone can make their work public online, it has also resulted in a kind of tyranny of real-time data. Attention becomes the only metric by which culture is

... See more

Art has both freshness and innate ambiguity; it avoids contributing to overfitting via stereotype. A nudge in one direction and it can veer to kitsch, a nudge in another and it can become too experimental and unduly alienating. Art exists in an uncanny valley of familiarity—art is like a dream that some higher being, more aesthetically sensitive,... See more