We are now living during a great ‘cultural mutation’. The concept of ‘cultural mutation’ may seem like an oxymoron. However, in a sense, human cultures have always flourished in areas where the boundaries between voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious factors were relatively subtle and unstable. While something of the sort has always occurred, over the last two and a half centuries or so – first in West and then in the global world – the phenomenon has acquired macroscopic proportions. Recently, the central role of the so-called ‘creativity’ in culture policies, as well as the industrialization of creativity itself, are, at the same time, a symptom and a further cause of a deep change. The semantic of the words ‘culture’, ‘art’, ‘creativity’ has di erent and even opposite meanings, due to the deep mutation produced by the current aestheticization of life and the econ- omicization of art and culture. The setting up of a concept of ‘medium’ philosophically developed beyond the usual ‘mediological’ studies and in synergy with the concept of ‘genealogy’ allows to understand conditions and causes of these current mutations in culture and in art; to glance into the complex intermedial apparatus of our society and its internal conflicts; to detect possibilities of resist- ances and alternatives to the aestheticization of economy and the economization of culture and art.