When I occasionally go shopping, I have been troubled by all kinds of weird thoughts: the neon lights on the shop signs are too dazzling, the clothes of the models in the windows are too gaudy, the saliva of passers-by is too scattered, and the clothes hanging in the alley are too garish. The clothes seemed to have become a pergola. When it's time to sort things out, I throw my thoughts into the big vat called "culture" and start another round of random thoughts.

Culture is indeed a big vat, and anything can be thrown into it. The old mailbox on the street is culture, the authentic Sichuan and Hunan cuisine is culture, the nakedness of a girl’s calves in winter is culture, and the tight wrapping in summer is even more culture. Even the Seven Deadly Sins, the incarnations of Satan's seven demons, can also rely on culture: Gluttony is food culture, Lust is erotic culture, Pride, Envy, and Sloth are workplace culture, and Wrath and Greed are, of course, the components of market culture. According to the most accepted definition, culture is "patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give these patterns importance." Wherever there are people, there is culture, even if that person is just a mummy thousands of years ago, it is very important. History and culture are passed down in a grand place.

But when you are alone at home, no matter a book, a piece of music, a bamboo plant, or a cup of tea, you have a lot of foundation, but you don’t dare to get involved with culture easily. If you accidentally let it slip that you are literate, the people around you will look at you like a child who is just beginning to enlighten you, and you will be satisfied if you know a few words. For individuals, "cultured" does not seem to be an admiration-induced evaluation.

So, does Shanghai have culture? Of course there is. Isn’t Shanghai a city with tens of millions of citizens? Even if they have done nothing, are doing nothing, and will do nothing, just by being still breathing is a culture of survival.

So, a young man named Han Han said "Shanghai has no culture", which attracted criticism: Shanghai has a glorious past, a gorgeous present and a brilliant future, so why does it have no culture?

Look at Han Han’s original words: “But Shanghai is a place without much culture. In other metropolises, you can say, what buildings, what hotels, what streets, what mansions we have here, etc. The leaders of Shanghai can also proudly announce that we have them here, but when people ask about what writers, directors, artists, art exhibitions, and film festivals we have here, the leaders of Shanghai have nothing to say.” After savoring it carefully, I realized Han Han's insidiousness. With just a few words, he replaced "culture" in a general sense with substantive "art". What is art? Art is "the sublimation of the human spirit and the nutrient of the inner connotation of life" and is the most rare component of culture. Culture often exists, but art does not.

When Han Han said this, his vision must not be broad enough. If he did not ignore the Zhang Qun and Wu Tiecheng eras intentionally or unintentionally, he could not ignore a long list of shining names: Xu Zhimo, Liang Shiqiu, Yu Dafu, Shi Zhecun, Wu Changshuo, Huang Binhong, Zhang Daqian, and Xiao Youmei’s National Music College and the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Industry Band, which was number one in the Far East at that time. However, these names have long since passed away. Today, let alone these names, just the eyes that can compare to them, I am afraid that they will never be seen in the world.

The era of Xu Zhimo and Liang Shiqiu is already too far away from us. We don't need to look at the dusty history, we just need to slowly look back and look at the times we have experienced and everything we have had.

We once had Wang Anyi, whose "Love in a Small Town", "Love in the Barren Mountains" and "Utopia Poems" once made my heart skip a beat, but have any of her writings in recent years moved me so much? We once had an exhibition of paintings by twelve people, which made us remember the Huangpu District Children’s Palace together. Where have gone, those once cutting-edge painters? We were once shocked by De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief" and Hitchcock's "Birds". What is it that shocks us now? Just "Avatar".

There are no traces of the former Shanghai Conservatory of Music’s weekly concerts and Jing’an Hotel indoor concerts. There, I experienced the gradual maturity of Xue Wei and Qian Zhou, and watched Kong Xiangdong play "Majeppa" on the keyboard, which was the eve before he set off to participate in the Tchaikovsky Competition. I remember the "Pasacaglia" played by Mr. Yu Lina and her quartet, I remember Mr. Zheng Shisheng's steps when he came on stage, as calm as David Oistrakh, and I remember Mr. Wen Kezhen's "Rainbow" The lingering sound of "Sister" and the thunderous cheers afterward. I remember Zhao Xiaosheng jokingly said to his friends "I can also sign" while signing the program list I handed over. It was his first public performance after returning to China. . What about now? The small auditorium of the Conservatory of Music became the He Luting Concert Hall, and the city also had a grand theater and a music center. Correspondingly, it was the half-season concert plan of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.

I was a frequent guest in the experimental theater of their school because of my classmates who taught at the Shanghai Theater Academy. The graduation performance of the previous year, "Henry V", was wonderful in performance and even more exciting in choreography. The audience roared with laughter when the king and his ministers appeared in robes made of old newspapers. Not long ago, I received another invitation, "21 Carats". I don’t want to belittle urban melodrama, but think about it, how long has it been since we had the opportunity to get close to Shakespeare on the stage?

The appearance of the city is becoming more and more magnificent; but the connotation of the city is slowly declining.

The view of noble people and refined scholars is naturally different from that of ordinary people. Their fine clothes cannot make them sigh, and their despicable ambitions will be despised.

How is it different when looking at cities?

In the face of all this, who can say that Shanghai has great art and outstanding artists? Who can say that Shanghai is a cultural city?