The sacred narratives of Western culture have been carried down from generation to generation for over two thousand years. In the past few decades, however, America has endured a despiritualization of its cultural traditions. Cultural waypoints have been gutted of their ineffable content by academic reductionism and the rabid commercialization of culture. With the decline in the intensity of the cultural experience, traditional cultural disciplines for acquiring ethical and aesthetic values have lost their influence on society. Today we stand at the end of an epoch. The fragmented masks of Western culture no longer reflect the postmodern persona. Western traditions have become anachronisms in postmodern society.

Culture, not commerce, is the common ground of civilization. Culture is often associated with education in the arts and humanities, but it is foremost the aesthetic, ethical and metaphysical values of society. It is the subjective alliance that binds and unifies. Culture is not academic or material or tangible. It is not image or information or technology. The content of culture transfers poorly into mass-reproduced prints and compact disks. The experience of the original is left out of the reproduction. The transcription is never complete. Culture is in the experience. It requires active involvement. Turning on the television is not enough. The individual has to seek (or at least be open to) the cultural experience.

But where does he go? One place the public can go is Venice, CA. Venice provides the basis for a grassroots reclamation of culture that has lasted for decades. It is at the apex of a desublimation process that derives culture from the mix of social alternatives. From across the country and around the world people crowd together on the boardwalk to be part of what is happening. Amid the extremes of Ocean Front Walk, culture develops directly from the interface of juxtaposed styles and personalities. In Venice, truth and meaning and cultural values work themselves out on the street. Culture is generated among people united by their participation in the boardwalk parade and by a common belief in the virtues of summertime at the beach.

Sunglasses, the hippest, coolest ones you can find, are the price of admission to the boardwalk parade. The sunglasses are a ritual mask, chosen to project an image. Behind the shades, personal spaces are secure. Although the spectator is on display, sunglasses provide aesthetic distance as he checks out alternative lifestyles passing in the crowd.

People come to Venice to be part of the summertime spectacle -- they come to see and be seen. They come to see how their choices and personal values compare with the norm. They shake their heads in collective disapproval at the passing indigents and panhandlers -- and laugh among themselves in nervous reassurance at what they don't understand. Nowhere else does the mix of influences that makes up contemporary America exist more openly than in the three-ring circus atmosphere of the Ocean Front Walk. Nothing is left in the closet. Standing in the crowd the individual feels the raw edge of the socialization process. He looks to find himself amid the barrage of leading edge alternatives. What he discovers is his place in postmodern society.

In the 21st century, what society requires of culture is not progress or tradition but symbols for transformation in the changing world. The boardwalk parade is progenitor for a new cultural discipline developing in response to society's need for the orienting experiences of culture free of capital motives. The boardwalk experience is not new. But as the emotive content of Western culture is lost to commercialism and reductionism, the experience of the summer time crowd on Ocean Front Walk stands out for its vitality. As cultural traditions falter, the population takes to the streets in search of cultural values. The boardwalk experience becomes the prototype of Neo-Pop, a new art form in the making -- an unexplored format for acquiring aesthetic and ethical values.

Capitalism co-opts any art form reducible to commodity. Neo-pop produces no commodities. It incorporates the subjective mechanisms of culture in a manner preempting direct corruption by capital interests. The boardwalk experience is essentially self-contained among the participants. It is augmented, but not corrupted, by street performers, fortune tellers, art galleries, mural art, local history and architecture and by the fashions of the shops and sidewalk vendors. On the boardwalk, culture is born of a self-actualization process free of capital subversion. Profiteers hover near the action waiting to cash in at every opportunity. But capital interests are largely unable to invade the cultural process unfolding on the boardwalk. They are unable to contaminate the aesthetic perceptions taking place in the crowd.

In many ways, life on Ocean Front Walk is a microcosm of life in America in the 21st century. The shift in personal values evoked by the boardwalk experience precedes similar realignments to be made across America in the coming decades. Culture is regenerative, a point missed by the pessimism of the 1980s. The grassroots regeneration of values through invented rituals in popular culture fills the void left by commercialism and reductionism. Neo-Pop signals a new direction in the arts. Through the masked rituals of Neo-Pop, minds are enlightened and cultural values are generated.