OVER the years I’ve probably worn a few clothes from cultures I didn’t have much contact with or didn’t understand.

Like most white people, until recently, I did this blithely, and without too much consideration for whether I was stealing someone else’s style and using it to my advantage.

To some extent it’s impossible not to when you live in a globalised society. It’s also particularly hard when you like fancy dress. I once, for a Halloween vampire party, dressed up as a Transylvanian travel rep. I thought this was probably okay at the time - now, I’m thinking I might as well have been wearing a sombrero.

These days it’s impossible not to look at the worlds of art, fashion or music, without the words 'cultural appropriation' hovering in the background. Almost every week brings with it a stream of related stories. Last week, we learned, for instance, that Sting had produced a reggae album with Shaggy, and had said he thought cultural appropriation was an “ugly” term. An Oxford college was forced to cancel its 420 “stoner” party (4.20pm is the time when high school kids in America themed around marijuana culture, because it seemed to lend itself to cultural appropriation of Rastafarianism.

These debates don’t always revolve around white people. Earlier this year, some activists questioned whether Beyonce dressing up as Nefertiti is cultural appropriation or “appreciation”, or if Bruno Mars, whose heritage is part Puerto-Rican, part Filipino, has appropriated black music or been involved in an “exchange” between cultures.

I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to listen to those who feel their culture has been in some way stolen and used to make money by others. But, at the same time, we don’t want a creative and cultural world that is overly cautious, in which everyone has to stick to the cultural songsheet of their grand-parents. We thrive through exchange. We also belong as much to the current moment as our heritage, and, yes, to a digital world.

The problem, we have to keep reminding ourselves, is power, money and capitalism, and the fact that we are dealing with cultural industries in which some small few - usually, but not always, white people - are profiting. It’s worth noting that those with power and privilege also do well at making money out of working-class culture.

The debate is also only likely to grow given the current crisis there is over authenticity in an increasingly globalised world. We see this not just amongst white people, but also among other affluent groups, who feel divorced from their cultural roots and have enough money to buy or borrow what they see as another’s authenticity – whether that be the clothes they wear, the way they dance, or even the drugs they take.

But authenticity is complex. White rapper Iggy Azalea recently defended herself against charges of cultural appropriation. “I’ve been in America since I was 16,” she said. “I’m about to be 28. America is gonna have an influence on me … If I’m influenced by it is it somehow inauthentic or an act?”

She has a point. There’s nothing more authentic than taking in the influences around you and splurging them out in your own fashion. We should all of us continue to do that. But it’s also clear, in our post-colonial society, that people of colour doing the same thing, for the most part, don’t profit in the way white people do.

So, let’s keep on sharing our songsheets. For that’s not the problem – rather it’s the money and who makes it. We can swap tunes, but also push for a world in which the power and wealth are just as shared.

WHY WILL SELF IS KILLING THE NOVEL

WILL Self has said he believes the novel is doomed. It's destined, he says, to “become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony”. Self has been saying this for a while about novels and yet he keeps on writing them as if determined to wallow in a long, slow suicide by countless thousands of clever, serious and funny words. True enough, fiction sales are falling, and fewer and fewer writers are able to earn a living out of their craft. An Arts Council of England report last year revealed that the average writer earns less than minimum wage. Fiction is also afflicted by the kind of winner-takes-all star system that afflicts almost all culture in the digital age. But, it’s not exactly the novel that's dead, it’s serious literary fiction of the type that Self writes. Meanwhile, the story-driven novel continues to provide the kind of tales that our culture revolves around. Novels have inspired a golden age of television. They were the basis of Game Of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, Babylon Berlin, Big Little Lies and many others. It’s often novels, in the form of audio books we are listening to as we go about our household jobs or commute to work. Young adult fiction is booming. Thrillers and detective novels now outsell all other fiction. When Self disregards this vibrant culture, he shows not only a literary snobbery, but a blinkered perspective. What’s doomed is the kind of book our literary Eeyore writes. Maybe he should take up easel painting. It might even cheer him up.