The modern is inherently sceptical; it should always presume to question without prejudice. It looks unsentimentally at what has been done and works to inform, stimulate and create what will be done. The past is our wealth, but dangers lie in the lazy replication of what has truly gone. The modern admits any value of what lies in the familiar but doesn't regard familiarity as necessarily a value in itself.

Whence any notion of the authentic is one of a constant changing from the past but with a vital retaining of the connections. This is in contrast to the fakery and stasis of tradition - that unquestioning adherence to the doing in the manner as is believed to have always been done, with the tautologous justification that it was always thus done. In contrast, the modern generates an authentic of the now.

The spurious regional and temporal stylisations of the material and mannered in today's global society are just ethnic kitsch: a stick-on set of thematic gimmicks to give synthetic flavours to an insipid mundanity. All cultures exist within the modern as subsets. Each is thereby, in itself, deficient. To dwell upon any presumption of one of them exclusively is merely quaint and arbitrary: an act of timid denial and simplistic fantasy. The discreteness of these sub-cultures is thus a facile myth. Products of their advocacy are trite parochial acts which may be expedient for a cynical few but are retarding for us all.

There is only one culture and that is the modern.