What is culture?

In a few weeks time Jersey will hold its first Culture Conference. The point is basically to try and work out 1) what culture is and 2) whether it’s worth whatever it is costs.

I have no idea what conclusions they will come to and to be honest I’m not entirely sure it’s actually possible to come up with ANY conclusions to the question of ‘what culture is’.

The best definition I’ve ever heard is the one Andrew Marr recorded for the new Culture Show website (more on that in a minute) where he said “There’s all the stuff you do to keep yourself fed and dry and everything else is culture.”

Which brings us on to the wider point of this post – a look at the new Culture Is application that currently makes up the entirity of the Culture Show website.

It’s a simple flash app with a number of pre-defined and user submitted keywords in reponse to the question “what is culture” as well as video vox pops with famous people telling us what they think culture is.

You’ve also got a number of images that relate to different ideas of culture and keywords linked to blog posts and articles on different aspects of culture.

So what is it?

Well if we go by a small selection of the keywords entered by the public it is both blue and greek. It’s dead and relevant as well as being singular and provocative.

Culture is both television and heritage, it’s gardening and orgasmic. It can be critical, avant and bubbling as well as shared, cheese and Kermode!

In fact it seems to be so many comflicting things all at once that the most relevant keyword is culture yes one of the keywords entered really is culture – culture is just culture.

Or going back to the original quote from Andrew Marr – culture is all the bits you don’t need to live.

Which brings up another interesting point – yes you COULD live without culture, you wouldn’t suddenly die if there were no museums, television, radio or Twitter but what kind of life would it be?

Even the poorest of people in the world have their own forms of culture – whether it be dance, football, discussion, debate or just talking.

What would a world be like where everything but existing was removed? Pretty shitty if you ask me.

Anyway back to the Culture Show. Personally I love it – although it’s a Radio 3 kind of love – it’s brilliant to know it’s there and I will tune in every now and then to prove I’m all cultural and interesting but I would probably turn over if an episode of Family Guy that I hadn’t seem was on BBC THREE.

So lets look at some other definitions of culture according to people voxed by the Culture Show website team.

To the mighty Vic Reeves culture is “a place that’s got an equal measure of creators and immaginative thieves.”

Whereas to an old man on Brighton Beach culture is “the way a person lives their life” and to a girl on the same beach culture is “to sit in a cafe and watch people and what they do, what they say and which languages they talk”.

To Jools Holland it is “the things that we make that are really great” which is a really interesting point and he includes “a boast down the pub” as a thing we make as long as it is “a good one.”

Donny Tourette of the Towers of London sees culture as “what you’ve been surrounded by or grown up with.”

And finally the one that really matters, the genious of all things odd Karl Pilkington says of culture that it “means too much” and that it is a word that “intelligent people like to use a lot”.

He went on to say that “you can’t just say I’m into culture because it’s like ‘what do you mean by that’” he said it is “the same as the word coffee”.

He also wondered whether it would “just phase out”.

So what do we get from those snippets of insight into the concept of culture?

I get that culture is everything and anything to whoever you ask at the time.

It can be watching a game of football, playing a game of football or even talking about a game of football with your mates.

It could equally be a series of weird 140 character comments on Twitter about sod all.

It could be a number of blog posts from multiple authors in the same town pulled together into a tag cloud to show what matters to people in that area.

To paraphrase Forest Gump for a minute “culture is a culture does”.

Oh and I didn’t really say anything about the web app itself – mainly because we’ve all seen these flash based collections of words and ideas before BUT it is very well done.