Cult-ure: Ideas Can Be Dangerous

by Rian Hughes

Culture is your local consensus reality; your clothing, cuisine and hairstyle, the music you listen to, the films you see; your values, ideas, beliefs and prejudices.

Today culture has a powerful new vector: the internet. Ideas — from a YouTube video to a viral marketing phenomenon or a fundamentalist religion — are traveling further and faster, and changing the cultural landscape like never before.

In the new electronic democracy of ideas, cultural power is devolving to the creative individual. Soon, we will all have the means to create.

We just have to decide whether it will be art or bombs.

CULT-URE is your incisive survival guide for navigating the modern landscape of ideas. Written and designed by Rian Hughes, and sporting such design features as a faux-leather cover, die-cuts and tip-ins, CULT-URE represents an experiment in 'authored design', a unique melding of graphics and text that provides a thought-provoking exploration of the media age, the persuasive language of signs, symbols and meaning, and the ideas – both benign and dangerous – that travel through them.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cultural, Design

240 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2011

About the author

Rian Hughes is a designer, illustrator, comic book artist, type designer and writer. From his studio, Device, he has produced watches for Swatch, Hawaiian shirts, logo designs for Batman and Spiderman and an iconoclastic revamp of British comic hero Dan Dare. His first novel is 'XX'. He has an extensive collection of Thunderbirds memorabilia, a fridge full of vodka, and a stack of easy listening albums which he plays very quietly.

Reviews

[Kyle Cameron Studstill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacularly abstract exploration of all the shapes culture takes. This is essentially 200 or so ways to look at all the things that make up something as nebulous as culture, from the ways ideas a spread to what ideas are, to how ideas are 'created' through framing.

Also there are secret puzzles throughout - the kind that you don't even know if they are puzzles or not, and you're never quite sure if you've solved them.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book marked down for quick sale in the bookstore at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and bought it because it is designed to look like a Bible but is actually full of imagery and musings on the concept of culture. The visual aspects of the book are in the end more arresting than the text, which leans heavily on the concept of the meme, coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976, which is supposed to be the cultural equivalent of the gene; i.e., a carrier of information or symbolic coding which may replicate itself and prove adaptive or maladaptive. The author/designer is a celebrated graphic designer and the book ends up sounding a warily optimistic, albeit cautionary note about the capacity for self-creation and self-definition that the internet explosion has handed to us, and includes a more or less sustained argument against any form of traditionalism or fundamentalism that seeks to repress or restrain free expression and exchange of ideas. Those who find such views themselves expressive of a particular cultural meme will find this book tendentious in the extreme, and those who find the very notion of the meme highly suspect will find it tedious, except perhaps for the images. I enjoyed it, but there are better works on the subject available, though perhaps none so visually stimulating. The book may or may not be read straight through, and the author provides a sort of built-in concordance for those who wish to follow certain themes in a more or less linear fashion.

[Chris Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The design, concept, and execution of this book are excellent. It was a unique and good read, and worked to present what could be stuffy or dense info. in a way that is exciting, accessible, and fresh. I do think it has a bent of bias to it at times which defeats its own mission, especially in the last half, and this prevented it from being as insightful as it could be. Since its publication we've seen the destructive power of memetic ideas and misinformation on a mass scale through our modern cultural delivery points in the USA and UK, but this book spends an outsized amount of time on the manipulative deployment and control of culture and media in the "east," or in the past, and outside of creationists, treats the western countries as if they've developed "immunities" or filters of discernment for taking in memes of culture and info. Religion is never really shown too positively in the text, but Islam is given an even worse depiction then Christianity IMO, and at sometimes it feels like a bit of a hitjob by using an "other" to prove a point that the author considers universal. But all this othering really feels like it uncritically sures up a lot of the hegemonic thought of the seats of western power. I guess the text encourages self reflection and critical analysis, but bits and pieces like this do not feel like they come out of the practice of self reflection and critical analysis.

In retrospect there is some hubris to a perspective that sees ideas as dangerous, and speaks in universals, but fails to turn the critical lens accurately on its on own culture.

[oenggun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just got this... flip and read some random pages ... still non-concentrated reading... but surely this is "21-st century answer to Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is The Message. .. the message IS the message.. forget the medium.

[Ece Ismen · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my all time favs

[Autumn · Rating 4 out of 5]

if performance art can be in book form, this is it.

[TheIMakeupMaven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great for getting out if a creative rut.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the visual, post-modern aspects, but the accompanying text was largely dry and unappealing. I think it could have covered the topic of culture in a much more interesting way.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Dan Hazelton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my life and quite simply made me a better designer.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, I'm re-reading this, mostly because of Hughes imminent novel "XX" which Grant Morrison has declared, "Accomplishes what Ulysses has failed doing", as well as his retrospective "Logo-A-Gogo".

Well-produced multi-media update on Malcom McLuhan's The Medium is the Message/Massage.

This feels like there are secrets and puzzles to unravel. It's very ergodic in structure and format. And reminds me of Chip Kidd, in that's its accessible yet still slightly pretentious design.

[Irina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice to flip around and read a few of the brief ideas, but on the whole I was a bit disappointed with the complexity of the content and the amateurish design of the book. I think this might be a very nice little idea reference book for those COMPLETELY new to the abstract concepts surrounding contemporary graphic design.

[Marius CEO · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nothing comes close to the reading experience of Cult-Ure. Nothing.

Its a book that is as unique as it is inspiring and elegant. Rian Hughes did a wonderful job in creating this masterpiece.

Loved every word... and every image.

[Nico Macdonald]

Found in Tate Britain bookshop. Beautifully designed and produced.