A person who loves art, music, movies, and dance, and all forms of culture so much that they consume whatever they find, whether or not it's any good. Like birds that scavenge by the roadside, culture-vultures feast on art wherever they find it. They will listen
to Mozart in the concert hall or the punk in a club; their clothes are as likely to come from the thrift store as they are a boutique shop; they have Architecture Digest on the coffee table while they watch
MTV Cribs. They consult the Oxford English Dictionary but double-check the Urban Dictionary. Culture vultures are especially good at talking about
low art and culture with the same insight and intelligence as
high art.
While I have always preferred the later symphonies of Beethoven to that infernal racket they play across the hall, when Liz came over, she explained that Beethoven was "giving the finger to the man" just like punk. It wasn't my first clue that she was a culture-vulture. On our second date, she wanted to show me some graffiti across the street from the museum where we saw the
Surrealist drawings. We stopped to get a hot dog but she insisted on putting her own
Dijon mustard on it, which she pulled out of her knockoff Gucci bag as though it were no big deal.
Culture vulture, indeed!
