Sublime

a movie like Do The Right Thing, by Spike Lee, that tackles America’s racial tensions, these productions offer a perspective on the world that is informed by the way a community sees the world. The creations of producers, like Glover and Lee, act as a vessel of cultural information that is discussed and negotiated by the community to decide whether

in a decentralized network, where people can connect with other people who share the same beliefs and see the world similarly, the central role of the network is the construction and exchange of cultural characteristics that flow across the network ties that bind the nodes.

As James Davison Hunter, the country’s leading scholar on character education, put it, “American culture is defined more and more by an absence, and in that absence, we provide children with no moral horizons beyond the self and its well-being.” Religious institutions, which used to do this, began to play a less prominent role in American life. Par

Their definition of culture was dominated by two large facts. First, cultural alternatives were now multiple, not vertically ranked; they spread across a field of choice generated by mass production and machine reproduction, and did not rise from the corner sweetshop to the Athenaeum Club. Second, books and painting were no longer socially dominant

Musician and innovator Brian Eno answers his own question—“What is cultural value and how does that come about?”—in “A Big Theory of Culture” (1997).

Of course this is what museum culture does: it, depending on your point of view, loots historical artifacts from a context in which they are useful and meaningful in order to turn them into commodities, or it protects and preserves the works while making them accessible to curious citizens of the world. Your own perspective on this might switch, de