A cultural icon is an artifact that is recognised by members of a culture or sub-culture as
representing some aspect of cultural identity.
Its form, therefore is distinct, reproducible, durable, and representing some narrative that
is understood by the receptive group.
Cultural icons vary widely, and may be visual, audio, an actual object including a building
or a vehicle, an event, a person or group of people, or may be applied to less tangible
concepts and ideas.
Religious icons can also become cultural icons in societies where religion and culture are
deeply entwined, such as representations of the Madonna in societies with a strong catholic
tradition.
In the media, many items of popular culture have been called "iconic" despite their lack
of durability.
Some commentators believe that the word is overused or misused, although an alternative
view is that the very availability of the media leads to an "increase of narrative meaning
between image and subject in common usage."
National icons
A web-based survey was set up in 2006 allowing the public to nominate their ideas for national
icons of England and the results reflect the range of different types of icon associated
with an English view of English culture.
Some examples are: Big Ben;
Cup of tea; Red Telephone Box;
Red Routemaster London double decker bus; Spitfire, a World War II fighter aircraft.
English eccentricity; Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the 1967 album by The Beatles.
Many of these may be recognisably English to other nationalities, but may have different
connotations.
Matryoshka dolls are seen internationally as cultural icons of Russia.
At the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games, as at other international sporting events, the
opening and closing ceremonies were littered with national icons.
The values, norms and ideals represented by a cultural icon vary both among people who
subscribe to it, and more widely among other people who may interpret cultural icons as
symbolising quite different values.
Thus an apple pie is a cultural icon of the United States, but Americans may not agree
on what it symbolises.
The term has varying meanings; it is described by Dr Mike Parker as the "contested and poorly
defined subject area of cultural iconicity".
National icons can become targets for those opposing or criticising a regime, for example,
crowds destroying statues of Lenin in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism or burning
the Stars and Stripes flag to protest about US actions abroad.
Use in popular media Describing something as iconic or as an icon
has become very common in the popular media.
This has drawn criticism from some: a writer in Liverpool Daily Post calls "iconic" "a
word that makes my flesh creep," a word "pressed into service to describe almost anything."
The Christian Examiner nominates "iconic" in its list of overused words, finding over
18,000 "iconic" references in news stories alone, with another 30,000 for "icon", including
its use for SpongeBob SquarePants.
See also Category:Lists of cultural icons
Pop icon Popular culture
References
Bibliography Biedermann, Hans.
Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them.
Meridan.
Brooker, Will.
Batman Unmasked: Analysing a Cultural Icon.
Continuum.
Edwards, Peter; Karl Enenkel, and Elspeth Graham.
The Horse as Cultural Icon: The Real and the Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World.
Brill.
Foudy, Julie; Leslie Heywood and Shari L Dworkin.
Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon.
University of Minnesota Press.
Gilbert, Erik.
The Dhow as Cultural Icon.
Boston University. *
Heyer, Paul.
Titanic Century: Media, Myth, and the Making of a Cultural Icon.
Praeger.
Heyer, Paul.
Titanic Century: Media, Myth, and the Making of a Cultural Icon.
Praeger.
Meyer, Denis C..
Cles Pour la France en 80 Icones Culturelles.
Hachette.
Nelkin, Dorothy and M Susan Lindee.
The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon.
University of Michigan Press.
Reydams-Schils, Gretchen J. Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon.
University of Notre Dame Press.
External links Our New Icons by The Daily Telegraph
Nothing and no one are Off Limits in an Age of Iconomania by The Age
British Postal Museum & Archive: Icons of England
Culture24: Icons of England