SOURCE: “Urbane Guerrilla,” in The New Statesman, August 29, 1986, pp. 24-5.

In the following review, Heron outlines the tenor of Eco's thought in Faith in Fakes, noting his insights and inconsistencies.

Time is going faster. The constant ‘past-ising’ process that Eco noted as a pervasive feature of American civilisation in 1975—when the Nostalgia sections in the big record stores held racks devoted to the Seventies as well as the Sixties—has accelerated and is no longer the strictly transatlantic phenomenon he then perceived.

Much of the opening essay in Faith in Fakes is taken up with remarking the symbolic transformations present in America's pursuit and capture of the Old World's cultural heritage—in the Hearst Castle, the Getty Museum and the Museum of the City of New York, as well as the numerous kitsch exhibition palaces that house elaborate artistic and architectural simulations. This cultural appropriation could be construed...