ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 I asked what is distinctive about living in a city. I saw the condition of proximity as enabling a division of labour, a sense of autonomy and new social relations among individuals (including the anonymity available in a large city). In this chapter I ask what the word culture means, citing Catherine Belsey’s (2002) definition as a vocabulary within which people act and Raymond Williams’s idea in The Long Revolution (1965) that social change occurs incrementally through cultural and educational changes. I draw on his definitions of culture in Keywords (1976), then look at Tate Modern as a major cultural institution. In case studies I cite a history of the colonisation of Mexico by Octavio Paz; an account of Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio for grass-roots architecture in the southern USA; and an image of pigeon lofts in Skinningrove in the north-east of England. All these counter the potential dominance of Tate by emphasising the cultures of dominated peoples and overlooked places, implying that culture does not need taking to supposedly underprivileged publics because they already have it in plenty. This oversimplification, however, rests on a confusion of culture as the arts and culture as a way of life. I begin by setting out contested meaning for culture so that such confusions can be avoided.
