> Just as a footnote to Chuck's long screed, let us note that
> the flight to suburbia and exurbia should also be seen in the
> context of this incipient cultural internationalization. It
> is usually seen as a flight from the race mixing of the
> cities; but it was equally a flight from the cosmopolitanism
> of the cities, a cosmopolitanism that provides the breeding
> ground for an international culture. This they rejected,
> which, at this point in history is tantamount to rejecting
> one's humanity.
Good observation, but it makes me wonder what is the cause and what is the effect. Is it that people moved to suburbia because they rejected cosmopolitanism, or they rejected cosmopolitanism because they moved to suburbia? I am inclined to think it is the latter. Aside my obvious preference for a materialistic model of behavior (the being determines consciousness thing), the flight to suburbia occurred at a high point of cosmopolitanism in the popular culture (cf. _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ which is explicit embracement of cosmopolitanism and a rejection of the home-grown folksiness). It seems that the flight to suburbia in the 1950s and 1960s was seen as "more of the good times" i.e. all the glamour of cosmopolitan culture plus the cozy feeling and small town privacy of the suburban residence - rather than a tradeoff between the two. So there is no evidence that people consciously rejected urban cosmopolitanism for suburban insularity (for otherwise one would find the manifestation of that rejection in the popular culture). Or perhaps it is the mix of the two. But in any case, it is a sad manifestation of the folk wisdom that one cannot have one's cake and eat it - cosmopolitanism will not survive in the suburbia, and sub urbanism will not survive in a cosmopolitan environment. One cannot have both. Regrettably, the scales are tilting toward suburban insularity.
As to Chuck's comments about the decline of internationalism in the Russian art after its tryst with modernity after the Revo. I am not sure if it is an accurate assessment. I think that Russia moved from the "decadent" internationalism of Western art (the Klimts, the Kandinskys, the Dalis), to the "proletarian" internationalism of socialist realism. In fact, social realism was a truly international style - itself a knock-off of the US architecture of the 1920s and a major Russian cultural export to its sphere of political influence (cf. this beauty http://www.pkin.pl/ in the middle of what before WW2 used to be Warsaw's Jewish district). Furthermore, internationalism has always been emphasized in the Soviet media and "mass-culture" - foreign coverage was the central feature of evening news, representatives of friendly Third World countries frequently appeared on television, streets and institutions were named after foreign leaders and luminaries (cf. Patrice Lumumba street where my grandparents lived or the JH Pestalozzi High School where I got my secondary education). In fact the US media are remarkably insular in their scope of coverage and intellectual perspective vis a vis the "communist" media I know from the other side of the iron curtain.
As to the hyper-realist knockoffs in the US culture - it does not have to be derogatory as Eco implies. The Hudson River School is a hyper-realistic knockoff of Constable and European romanticism, yet arguably produced the best paintings on this side of the pond in the 19th century. I think hyper-realism can be seen as a mixture of several trends, the didactic impulse (unheard of in the elitist Europe when Eco wrote his essay) to bring art and history to the masses not accustomed to reading books, an attempt to find a "third way" between "decadent abstractionism" of the cultural elites and "know nothing" insularity and anti-intellectualism of the populace, and the natural expression of fundamental eclecticism that characterizes the US culture i.e. the tendency to take culturally diverse elements and blend them together into a coherent "universal" (i.e. acceptable to everyone, hence hyper-realistic rendition) whole, which underlies anything from Disneyland to unitarian universalism.
Wojtek