The article is devoted to relevant issues of humanitarian knowledge and cultural transformations. It investigates changes in culture, impacted by technological progress and standardization of culture, which, first of all, decreased interest in the humanities fields of culture. The focus is made on total commercialization, which has influenced a lot of cultural areas. The authors analyze the causes of those changes, including in the cinema, which, in their opinion, is more and more tends to become an industry dressed in the clothes of art, rather than art itself. The article concludes that the rapid massovization of culture transforms the cinema, turning it into a global market and thus devaluating the very concept of "creativity". This study also touches on the issue of the interaction between language and culture, which serve as a barometer of what is taking place. The main problems of modern verbal culture are distinguished. The article focuses on the emergence of a “newspeak”, which transforms ideals, including the culture of speech, into “simulacra”, sign fetishes (according to Jean Baudrillard). The authors concluded that the discursive hierarchy disappears and the status of normative vocabulary changes in the modern language. Everyone more or less speaks the same language, which mixes together slang, jargon, computer slang, and anglicisms, desacralizes obscenity, deprives words of their meaning, makes visual imagery dominant.In the context of general transformations of culture, the authors are trying to determine the place of knowledge produced by humanities, which has become more of a description, a depiction of contemporaneity. It is established that the search for new cultural values is the only right direction for humanities knowledge.