Cultural Indicator Quotes

Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation's currency.

If you know what kind of music somebody loves, then you can kind of figure out why they do what they do.

Fashion is a reflection of our times. Fashion can tell you everything that's going on in the world with a strong fashion image.

Fashion is fragile and fleeting. But it is also an indicator for the cultural and social appetites for a nation.

Fashion is very quick. It's very disposable. It's immediately - it tells you exactly where we are in our culture, especially women's fashion.

The canary bird in the coal mine theory of the arts: artists should be treasured as alarm systems.

I want to form a political party that's based entirely on what music people listen to. To me, it's a much better barometer of what they think and feel than their political stance.

It is one of the benchmarks of a culture I always think – the page at which it operates. A good way to measure it is to order a taxi and see how irate local people get if it is late.

Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come.

There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.