Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (orig. US) anyone who battens on to the prevailing cultural trends in order to debase and exploit them for economic gain, irrespective of the aesthetic loss involved.

[1941		P. Larkin letter 23 July in Thwaite Sel. Letters (1992) 19: I go to Stratford Memorial Theatre every Saturday to see Shakespeare [...] I’m a vulture for culture in my own way].
1949		Commentary 8 506: [The] pantheon of Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Melville, James, and Kafka, which we are likely short-sightedly to resent these days af having become merely chic, capable of being admired by the culture vulture.
1959		C. MacInnes Absolute Beginners 119: The culture-vultures get all the art kick they want out of snapshots.
1968		Punch 18 Sept. 413: Long before my time the pioneer culture-vultures dismembered Charles Chaplin: some said he never got put together properly again.
1992		K. Lette Llama Parlour 43: Let’s be culture-vultures.
1997		P.-D. Uys No Space on Long Street (2000) 12: My dear, the Culture Vultures has come to Long Street. God help us all!

2. (W.I./US black) a Rastafarian term for white society.

1994

(con. 1980s) N. McCall Makes Me Wanna Holler (1995) 332: They called white folks [...] ‘culture vultures’ because, they said, whites devalued blacks to our faces while at the same time trying to steal and capitalize off our creativity.