The paper aims at diagnosing the underlying causes for the state of visual culture in Poland and indicating the directions of the new cultural policy for the country. The method applied is a combination of auto-ethnography with analytical development of several hypotheses based on the materials from the realm of cultural anthropology. Part of the reasoning conducted in the article is important methodologically and intended for practitioners. It is based on the comparison between today’s challenges facing the devisers of cultural policy and the challenges from 30 years ago, when the author was building a project of cultural policy for the government of those days. Due to the lack of decisive legitimisation of activities in the ideological sphere, the author defines cultural policy as enhancing the values and mitigating the flaws in the existing state of culture. The crucial thesis of the text positions the source of divisions in the contemporary Polish visual culture in the ideological sphere. The ideological division is discussed in the text in the categories of modernizers and conservatives. As a crucial part of symbolic culture connected with visual perception, the visual culture is divided according to beliefs which have either a radically discursive character (in the light of contemporary science one cannot unambiguously resolve their truthfulness) or they remain impossible to be captured rationally. They are a matter of faith and embedded in religious rituals. That is why, among others, we cannot ignore the philosophical foundations of cognition. Part of the article refers to the readiness of contemporary humanities to address the complicated issues of the cognitive theories in the light of such directions of thought as post-correlationism. As a result, a comparison between the resolutions enhancing the coexistence of the state and free market in the sphere of culture, postulated in the project of cultural policy from 1998, and the contemporary dysfunctional cohabitation of the camp of radical modernizers with the camp of conservatives, allows the author to formulate – in the form of a project – a number of proposals. They have character of philosophical and ideological theses as well as organizational and institutional proposals. Additionally, a question was posed about the need to establish a state institution monitoring the cases of ideological ‘corruption’ in the public institutions of culture. The conclusions are formulated in over a dozen points. What was found to be relevant is, among others, the emphasis of the significance of modernity as a modernizing option, supporting the local cultural potential and Christianity as a reservoir of idiomatic forms of intellectual speculation.