Letters to Ukraine – 4

Can you direct me to your Culture, please? Imagine tourists lost in the suburbs, asking you that. Would you steer their gaze towards the brutal lines of high-rise flats? To those grimly functional, overlit boxes we call supermarkets? If the way we build reflects our collective mind, then the physical pride of our culture resides primarily in city centres, in our showpiece museums, galleries and state monuments. Most citizens, however, must endure nondescript tenements, schools and shops. Shabby streets. We can visit country cottages and lanes that delight the eye; but our cities deploy “high culture” carefully, even cynically, to remain within eye’s reach of the businessperson, banker and (crucially) tourist. Meanwhile, popular culture is collapsing away from the material, external world of buildings towards the virtual, internal universe of the Internet and TV. “Whoever controls the media, the images,” said poet Allen Ginsberg, “controls the culture.” Is mass culture revealing itself to the eye through those particular forms distributed by advertising and business, designed to enact material and symbolic control? Increasingly, that “culture” arrives via the same few conglomerates and their media/ advertisement think-tanks. Is that why the suburban world, everywhere, has begun to look the same? Are we all becoming lost there?