cultural saturation Quotes

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.

I think the word 'woke' is now over. The first time I heard my mature, white dad use that term, I was like 'OK, this is done.'

You need to find a way to propel this creativity to the masses. People get brainwashed and they start to forget what's good.

England is so surrounded by the boredom of conventionalities, that it is all one to them whether music is good or bad, since they have to hear it from morning till night. For here they have flower-shows with music, dinners with music, sales with music.

It's funny, now there are so many bands that I can never remember any of their names. Maybe it's because I'm old.

It seems hard for the American people to believe that anything could be more exciting than the times themselves. What we read daily and view on the TV has thrust imagined forms into the shadow. We are staggeringly rich in facts, in things, and perhaps, like the nouveau riche of other ages, we want our wealth faithfully reproduced by the artist.

It's so difficult to shock America these days.

Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.

HISTORICALOVERDOSING:To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen.

It's in the films and songs and all your magazines. It's everywhere that you may go, the devil's radio.

What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward - neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

We are living in a popular culture where everything is overexposed.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.

The blues was so big in the late '60s that it kinda wore itself out, and people weren't diggin' the blues as much.

In Australia, I grew up watching 'The Mickey Mouse Club,' my son grew up watching 'Sesame Street,' my grandson's growing up watching 'Dora The Explorer.' So we are sort of saturated with American culture from the day we're born, and to those of those who do have an ear for it, it's second nature.

What a glut of books! Who can read them?

It just annoyed me that people got so into the Beatles. "Beatles, Beatles, Beatles." It's not that I don't like talking about them. I've never stopped talking about them. It's "Beatles this, Beatles that, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles, Beatles." Then in the end, it's like "Oh, sod off with the Beatles," you know?

I've written so many songs about Englishmen, I have to go elsewhere.

Our economy's growth functions by inciting us to produce more and more with each passing year. In turn, we require cultural forms to enable us to sort through the glut, and our rituals are once again directed towards the immaterial, towards quality and not quantity.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

Some scholars attribute the decline in nicknaming to the evolutionary process that turned folk heroes into entrepreneurs. The truth is: George Herman Ruth, the namely-est guy ever, exhausted our supply of hyperbole.

The critics are like tourists who return from a trip saying they've "done" Machu Picchu: "Okay, we've done magical realism," so now we can throw it out.

There was a time when I kept track of it all; when my mind worked like a giant lint brush being swept over the fuzzy surface of popular culture. But these days, pop culture seems to have gotten fuzzier and fuzzier; notoriety comes and goes in the snap of a finger.