1961The Crisis in CultureHannah Arendt
Art HistoryEssay · 1961
The Crisis in Culture
Hannah Arendt
The essay appeared in Between Past and Future in 1961, as the last of the six exercises in the Viking first edition. Arendt separates culture from entertainment by what each does to its objects: entertainment consumes them, culture cares for them and lets them last. The link is to the Penguin Classics edition of the whole collection, which is the eight-essay version of 1968 rather than the original six.
Why you should read this
Arendt's essay on how mass society threatens culture by turning art into entertainment and cultural objects into things to be consumed rather than judged. Draws on Kant's account of aesthetic judgment to argue that taste, not creation, is the properly cultural faculty.
- Field
- Art History
- Form
- Non-fiction
- Published
- 1961
- Themes
- CultureArt History
