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Home | What is Hello Culture? | The grid | The interviews | Find out more | Credits
Culture is like someone's record collection. It defines the person in a way they're probably not even all that conscious of. So culture defines us — that's the job we give it to do, to tell us what we are. We believe in it, but it also tells us what we believe, what our values are.
Record collections can be neatly filed carefully from A to Z. They can also be spread haphazardly around a house. Each record, tape and CD stands for an idea, but it also stands for a lineage of other ideas behind the main one. Join up the dots between all these and you've got a system — and that is culture.
Culture is all around us, but what is it? It used to be easy to define. There was high culture and then everything else, but now it's all mixed up. And that says a lot about who we are in the new 21st century.
Culture now is all about how we think — that's its attraction. It's fresh, it's pop, it's newly minted. But what is our culture really? What is it made up of? What are the ideas in it and what does it say about us?
This website maps our own cultural moment. Seeing what connects to what. Not tearing culture apart but going up to it and shaking its hand — saying hello.
Romanticism then and now
Have you ever felt that you had something deep inside that you longed to express? If only you knew how or if only you didn't feel that that something was so deep, so real, so raw, so free from lies, so natural that to touch it you would die. Well, that's Romanticism. It's an idea from the past, but we still have it.Romanticism (with a capital 'R') can be dated from about 1780 to 1848, that year of (failed) revolutions all over Europe except here. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature:
A list of those early Romantics — famed for their writing, art, music and, for some, simply the way they lived their lives — reads like a roll-call of late 17th-century/early 19th-century excess and, occasionally, sheer looniness: the French artist Delacroix and the German one Friedrich, the rebel-poet Percy Shelley and the wild mystic William Blake, the sex-obsessed Marquis de Sade and the opium-smoking de Quincey.
Romanticism from 200 years ago to 2001 is a reality system that comes from the imagination. It looks for and recognises extremes — from light to dark, from joy to dejection. Imagination, which creates the world, has to be kept supplied with feeling and intensified, otherwise the world dies. For the world to exist and for imagination to work, something has to be happening.
'Happenings' were a feature of the hippy culture of the 1960s, which was the last time we had a mass movement with an ideology that was virtually a mirror image of 18th-century Romanticism. Nature is honest, cities are bad. Say no to society, but yes to free love and wild children.
All the serious romantic elements were there: social revolution, great changes, new awakenings and new freedoms. But now they were in a pop context. We didn't have to buy a book and read a poem to get the Romantic message. Millions could buy an LP for one pound ten shillings and listen to the lyrics.
Today, more than three decades on from the flower children, we're not anti-Romanticism — we're fascinated by it. We've had all those years since our last big outburst of Romantic feeling in the 1960s to experiment with what it is to feel something. However, although we want the intensity and seriousness that Delacroix had, we want it in a fragmented way. We want to cut the big ideas of the past down to size to fit ourselves.
The imagery at today's Glastonbury festivals isn't revolutionary. It's playing with Romanticism but with a smiley face. It's nature children wearing toy fairy wings in a medieval theme park. The pagan sun god is lovely and kind — full of presence Š or carrot cake and spliffs. Not menacing, awesome, poetic.
The six faces of Romanticism
There are six broad themes in Romanticism that still have a resonance today:
Freedom/wildness
The passionate, poetic, revolutionary individual The wild landscape outside and the wild feelings within.
Madness
To rise above the lowly plane and on to a higher one, to glimpse something profound, to see the truth of existence, not just illusions and veils. To do this through the working (or non-working) of your own mind or with the assistance of drugs.
Badness
Something we demand from artists. Famous people behave badly and people behave badly to become famous. Appetite is all — but with flair.
Blackness
Exotic otherness. Whites' attempts to assume a black identity or siphon off blackness as a cultural value. Black-made reflections of a black world.
Nihilism
Terror of the darkness, of the void below, of nothing existing behind illusion except darkness. Negation. Spiritual blankness.
Celebrity
Once was awarded for representing higher values, now is the icon of success in an utterly value-free world.
And now for something completely different... Realism
The scholar Sir Paul Harvey once defined Realism as 'truth to the observed facts of life (especially when they are gloomy)'. The term is so hard to pin down that it is generally only used in contradiction to some other, more exotic movement Š such as Romanticism.
From the French artist Gustave Courbet to the Depression singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie and the Reality TV of Big Brother, Realism has always been there, pricking the balloons of the Romantics.
Bringing it all together
To experience the heyday and remnants of Romanticism — and to take a cold shower with the Realists — have a look at the Hello Culture grid.
Under seven headings — Freedom/wildness, Madness, Badness, Blackness, Nihilism, Celebrity, Realism — you will find examples of all aspects of these themes: heroes and heroines, gurus, tribes, movements, music, film, art, literature and poetry.
The grid is by no means the last word — it is designed to give you a taste of the experimentation and danger that Romanticism still has the power to evoke.