The Nobel laureate who thinks culture is dead

Notes on the Death
of Culture: Essays in Spectacle and Society
by Mario Vargas Llosa
Faber & Faber (20)

Culture is dead. Culture is as dead as a door nail. The slowly tolling bell that resounds though this polemic by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa may come as a surprise to those busily taking in concerts, exhibitions, the latest plays and prize-winning novels. But the act of engaging with culture, says Vargas Llosa, does not make you cultured: it is more likely to mean that you are a cultural tourist for whom proximity to such things replaces the need for serious interest.

Vargas Llosa's title is lifted from T S Eliot's iconic Notes on the Definition of Culture (1948) and the subtitle is a reference to Guy Debord's landmark Society of the Spectacle (1967). Notes on the Death of Culture is in conversation with both these texts, but nothing Vargas Llosa says is as sharp or as stimulating as a single sentence by Eliot or Debord. Instead, he grumbles away like an out-of-touch dad who doesn't like his daughter's taste in music.

This does not mean, however, that he is without a point. Vargas Llosa is right that intellectuals have needed to become showmen (witness Germaine Greer), and that committed engagement has been displaced by distraction. His argument throughout is that entertainment has replaced depth: "Culture is entertainment and what is not entertaining is not culture." Journalists and politicians are today's entertainers and even education is packaged as entertainment (the term, thankfully not known by Vargas Llosa, is actually "edutainment").

We are mired in ephemera: while Tolstoy wrote to "defeat death" and "to open people's eyes", Brazilian soap operas and Bollywood movies "do not exist any longer than their performance". Tolstoy faced up to the void, but Brazilian soaps avert their gaze from the harsh realities. The comparison is ridiculous. For Vargas Llosa, Shakira is a failed version of Thomas Mann.

Culture used to mean high culture but today we refer to pop culture, media culture, black culture, youth culture. You can't throw a stone without hitting someone's special culture. We even, Vargas Llosa notes, talk about "paedophile culture". Culture is no longer something to rejuvenate and challenge the mind but "a pleasant way of spending time", and all cultures have the same value – the philosophy of Kant is considered equal to the posterior of Kim Kardashian.

Religion gave birth to culture but the paedophile culture at the core of the Catholic church has corroded the institution, while Islamic fanatics are against the culture of free speech. A cultured society needs to be secular, but here Vargas Llosa gets into knots because he also argues that for a society to be truly free, there needs to be "an intense spiritual life".

We once had critics, but now it is Oprah Winfrey who makes or breaks a book. And what happened to the cinema icons? For Vargas Llosa – rather touchingly – we are in the age of Woody Allen, who is "to David Lean or Orson Welles what Andy Warhol is to Gauguin". Vargas Llosa weakens his argument by being so often out of date: does anyone still go to Woody Allen films?

Contemporary art, he despairs, is about conning the viewer and he refers with wearying inevitability to Damien Hirst's shark and Chris Ofili's use of elephant dung (both phenomena of the 1990s) as though nothing else had happened in the art world.

The culture pages of newspapers have been taken over by food, fashion and lifestyle (none of which, according to Vargas Llosa, constitute culture). Politics, now also entertainment, has become as "banal" as literature, film and art; politicians are more concerned with whitening their teeth than standing by their promises. WikiLeaks has done no more than reveal the trivia of political life: Assange is not a "great freedom fighter" but a "successful entertainer". The excitement over Carla Bruni's presence in the Elysée Palace proved that even the sophisticated French have lost their intellectual integrity and succumbed to the "universally prevailing frivolity".

The f-word is repeated like a mantra. Everything that Vargas Llosa dislikes is denounced as "frivolous", and frivolity is equivalent to banality, bad taste, gossip, superficiality and ignorance. Our "frivolous approach to sex" means that the art of eroticism has been replaced by the "animality" of pornography. While eroticism is enriching, pornography is instinct without imagination. Vargas Llosa is a fan of erotica, but much of what he calls erotic would be seen by others as pornographic. It was ever thus. He does provide one interesting fact: Spanish schoolchildren are given lessons in masturbation. The aim is to reduce unwanted and premature pregnancies, but the effect, says Vargas Llosa, will be to further trivialise sex, to dissociate it from passion and rid it of mystery.

Culture, it seems, is alive and kicking but not as we know it. This report of its death is greatly exaggerated.