Quotes About Culture

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life--its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness--conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.

Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle.

A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying.

Recientemente la fotografía se ha transformado en una diversión casi tan cultivada como el sexo y el baile, lo cual significa que la fotografía, como toda forma artística de masas, no es cultivada como tal por la mayoría. Es sobre todo un rito social, una protección contra la ansiedad y un instrumento de poder.

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies.

Not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard –and the most articulate audience– of Camp.

El más lógico de los estetas del siglo XIX, Mallarmé, afirmó que en el mundo todo existe para culminar en un libro. Hoy todo existe para culminar en una fotografía.

O fotógrafo é um superturista, um prolongamento do antropólogo, que visita os nativos e regressa com notícias dos seus costumes exóticos e estranhos ornamentos. O fotógrafo procura sempre colonizar novas experiências ou encontrar novos modos de olhar para temas familiares - para lutar contra o tédio.

Ah, these English. So refined and so coarse. If they did not exist, nobody would ever have invented them. So eccentric, so superficial, so reserved. But how they enjoy themselves.

30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

A fotografia não se limita a reproduzir o real, recicla-o, o que constitui um processo-chave de uma sociedade moderna

Gaudi's lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal — most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia — the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.

What do I believe? In the private life, in holding up culture, in music, Shakespeare, old buildings…

Let's take a positive view. The mountain is an emblem of all the forms of wholesale death: the deluge, the great conflagration (sterminator Vesevo, as the great poet was to say), but also of survival, of human persistence. In this instance, nature run amok also makes culture, makes artifacts, by murdering, petrifying history. In such disasters there is much to appreciate.

our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images

It is often asserted that "the West" has increasingly come to see war itself as a spectacle. Reports of the death of reality—like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature—seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture.

A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertendy in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photograph: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights.

Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Susan Sontag Partisan Review (Winter 1967), p. 57. Also What's Happening in America (1966) The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history

As the old advertising slogan of Paris Match, founded in 1949, had it: "The weight of words, the shock of photos." The hunt for more dramatic (as they're often described) images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value.

Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle.