The Culture That Was

It seems like culture is on sale everywhere and only spectacle counts. What appears to be a financial crisis is really a moral crisis. In his 2013 Nexus Lecture, ‘The Future of Humanism’, Nobel Prize Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa identifies the general loss of authority as one of the main causes of today’s slump in education, art and politics. In a public discussion with Rob Riemen, Vargas Llosa made a passionate plea for reading books, as a means to secure the future of humanism.

The notion of culture has expanded so much that it has simply vanished.