A Quote by Vivienne Westwood

Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture.

Vivienne Westwood

Quote Topics

Contradiction Culture Popular Popular Culture Terms

Quote Author

Vivienne Westwood
English - Designer
Born: April 8, 1941

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.

Mark Steyn

My working hypothesis is that stupidity in popular culture is a constant. Popular culture cannot get more stupid.

P. J. O'Rourke

I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program.

Judith Butler

It is fashionable to scoff at Americans, but they routinely produce most of the important and ground-breaking entertainment in the world. 'Popular culture' is still culture, Shakespeare was once as popular as any of today's icons with the common people.

Ian O'Doherty

I suppose I do the Japanese because I just don't know China. Chinese popular culture has never evoked that instant of, "Whoah! What's that?" that I have with Japanese popular culture.

William Gibson

I am trying to encourage kids to do something that isn’t yet on their mind because it is not in popular culture. Popular culture tells you 'music, music, sports, sports.' It neglects the importance of a STEM education.

will.i.am

One meaningful distinction between high and popular culture, is that there's way more good popular culture - because its standards of quality are more forgiving, because sobriety isn't its default mode, because there's so damn much of it.

Robert Christgau

When artists and philosophers talk only amongst themselves, they ignore the potential of popular culture to become a variety of dialogues with and between everyday people. Its discourse may be productive of desire and pleasure, but popular culture is also a language in which people discuss politics, religion, ethics, and action.

Brenda Laurel

I don't hear any of the popular stuff unless it's good 'cause I pay no attention to popular culture, at all.

T Bone Burnett

What I like about popular culture is its accessibility, and I've covered popular songs because they are amazing things.

Robert Wyatt

Like commercial stuff is sort of cheap and disposable and fun and can be sort of interesting in many ways. I love being in popular culture and existing in the evolution of popular culture. But it's so different from painting, and it's so different from that sort of slow, contemplative, gradual process that painting is.

Kehinde Wiley

Professional wrestling in Europe is more of a sub-culture. It is not as popular as it is here in the United States. The people that were drawn to it were also people that were into sub-culture, hardcore sub-culture. It is basically an alternative scene that is sub-culture.

Aleister Black

For example, we have developed an artistic and a literary culture. Nevertheless, the ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy.

Paul Virilio

One of the many things I hate about Donald Trump is that he embodies a kind of very popular popular culture that, as near as I'm able to perceive and stomach, is of no quality whatsoever.

Robert Christgau

With what's happened in the world the last three years, it's easier to see why it's become popular again to diminish and revile Arabs and Muslims in American popular culture.