ArtLex on Culture

culture - The entirety of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, and all other products of human work and thought: decorative artifacts, environmental pollutants, high art, political ideologies, ritual beliefs, social customs, and so on.

In cognitive terms, culture is a group of learned and shared standards for perceiving, believing, acting, and evaluating the actions of others.

In anthropology, culture refers to the way of life of a human society, especially traditions transmitted from one generation to the next by learning and by experience. Cultural universals include social organization, religion, structure, economic organization, and material culture (sometimes called visual culture). The spread of culture traits (customs, ideas, attitudes) among groups by direct or indirect contact is called diffusion. The general stages in cultural evolution are nomadic food gathering, then settled food producing, and finally urban dwelling.

In the arts, the term is often used to refer to the expression of a particular period, class, or community, especially intellectual and artistic activity, and the works produced by it. Also, development of the intellect through training or education. And, culture can refer to a high degree of taste and refinement formed by aesthetic and intellectual training.

"What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real."
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Irish playwright.
"If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance."
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Quoted in: Jaime Sabartés, Picasso: portraits et souvenirs, chapter 9 (1946).
"Art is what we do; culture is what is done to us."
Carl Andre (1935-), American minimalist sculptor.

Culturekiosque.com is an online journal of arts and culture based in Europe and covering the arts and museum scene worldwide.

Also see archaeology, counterculture, dance, ethnic, ethnocentrism, ethnosphere, heritage, interdisciplinary, kitsch, multiculturalism, music, theater, xenophilia, and xenophobia.