The cultural eclecticism of globalism: perspectives from Russia

Abstract

The paper deals with the reflection of the processes of globalization and multiculturalism in the guise of modern cities. According to the authors of the article, graffiti is a purely urban phenomenon. Modern graffiti is a palette of emotions, feelings, expressive existence, peculiar to the young people, and the modern city is the focus of mad speeds. In this focus of speed collides the seething thirst for life of the youth and the phenomenon of alienation. The dialectic of this contradiction determines the emergence and development of graffiti as a form of self-expression shaped as street art, or as it is sometimes called, the underground art. Graffiti as a component of street culture expresses the trends of globalization and its subjects, methods, and formats of performance: they are universal and do not have national peculiarities. In this case, the subject line of graffiti is a reflection of the specific features of culture, ideology, history, and traditions, that is, the mentality of a particular society. The authors of the paper present the lack of a single methodological, artistic and ideological orientation as cultural eclecticism. The article represents graffiti as a deviation, however, not as illegal acts but as an orientation of an individual to creative activity, as an act of self-actualization. In the study of graffiti as a socio-cultural phenomenon, parallels are drawn with the art of graffiti in various countries of the world, considering it as a form of multicultural integration. In modern interpretation, graffiti should be viewed as a kind of art, since it is artistic and aesthetic personal reflection of the personality, and creative form of its expression. Graffiti as an extra-national and meta-social phenomenon is simultaneously a manifestation of universalism of the global socio-cultural tendencies, and an expression of eclecticism of the new forms of the modern city. The main cultural values are outside of time. Traditional values, modified and mutated, are updated in accordance with trends.