Is there such a thing as American culture?

This, then, is my surmise: the dominant apparatus of American high culture is that of custody. The institutions of learning and of the arts constitute the great archive, inventory, catalogue, storehouse, rummage-room of western civilization. American curators purchase, restore, exhibit the arts of Europe. American editors and bibliographers annotate, emend, collate, the European classics and the moderns. American musicians perform, Often incomparably, the music which has poured out of Europe from Guillaume de Machaut to Mahler and Stravinsky. Together, curators, restorers, librarians, thesis writers, performing artists in America underwrite, reinsure the imperiled products of the ancient Mediterranean and the European spirit. America is, on a scale of unprecedented energy and munificence, the Alexandria, the Byzantium of the ‘middle kingdom’ (that proud Chinese term) of thought and of art which was Europe, and which may be Europe still.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 281–82

<idle musing>
Fascinating idea—and probably true. I can't think of a single original (nontechnology) idea that has sprung from the United States.
</idle musing>