Corruption of culture is a false reinterpretation of cultural narrative with the purpose of promoting single cultural actors’ personal or group interests damaging the other.
Corruption of culture can be defined as the inability of the individual to put the wellbeing of the community above their own interest in different cultural contexts (national, ethnical, elitist, populistic, organizational, managerial, curatorial or any other). Specifically, the corruption of cultural practices is the ones linked to the misusing or abusing different elements of culture by increasing the individual interest while decreasing the benefits for others. Different forms of this type of corruption include xenophobic otherness, reinterpreting narratives for individual wellbeing on the damage of other people; cultural elitism vs. kitsch; manipulating organizational values; abusing the elements of other cultures (e.g., homophobia); misunderstanding functions and goals of different organizations (e.g., curatorial crisis). This understanding of corruption of culture is strongly dependable on the temporal and spatial context, namely on what is considered to be the wellbeing of the individual vs. the wellbeing of the community at one specific moment in time and on what is understood as the wellbeing of the individual vs. of the community within one specific social and economic context.
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