Why do people wear shirts with the Shakespearian quotation “to be or not be?” or a portrait of philosopher Slavoj Žižek? How does popular and mass media adaptation and appropriation influence theoretical or literary concepts like ‘deconstruction’ or the ‘Kafkaesque’? Why are Lolita, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Einstein ubiquitous and yet Leopold Bloom, Francisco de Goya’s The Naked Maja, and Leó Szilárd are not? Our answer is simple: because some elements taken from literature, art, humanities and science are cultural icons. Cultivated in expert’s cultures and the popular these elements are venerated and sometimes desecrated representatives of what is considered to be outstanding or even a peak of human culture and what is a component of identity formation. This chapter spans an umbrella over the contributions gathered in this volume that discuss manifold examples of the widespread, decontextualized—and, thus, often schematized—forms of literature’s, art’s, humanities’ and science’s appearance in culture as cultural icons. This first part of this chapter provides a brief overview of the theory of cultural icons while the second part focuses in more detail on the underlying processes of iconization and its actors: intermedia circulation and creation of cultural value.