Cultural Display Quotes

When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.

The Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, actually, was an effort to put something on the mall in Washington so American tourists could walk through America, and in their minds everything on the mall would be American.

When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.

People like a bit of color and like a bit of pomp and circumstance and ceremony, and we’re rather better at it than most countries.

Fashion is primitive in its insistence on exhibitionism, which withers in isolation. The catwalk fashion show with its incandescent hype is its apotheosis. A ritualized gathering of connoiseurs and the spoilt at a spotlit parade of snazzy pulchritude, it is an industrialized version of the pagan festivals of renewal. At the end of each seasonal display, a priesthood is enjoined to carry news of the omens to the masses.

People have to identify with something to show they have reached a certain goal. Anyway, in Russia it's done with medals. You put on all these medals to show who you are.