ABSTRACT
American Beauty is an exemplar of suburban expose. However, it is not just a critique of the vacuousness and pretensions of US middle-class life; it is also, as its title suggests, an indictment of middle-class aesthetics. Hollywood’s rejection of US middle-class suburban life and taste echoes a long tradition of similar indictments by US writers and public intellectuals ranging from Sinclair Lewis to Lewis Mumford to Allen Ginsberg. The general disregard among anthropologists of US middle-class aesthetics also stems partly from a long-held suspicion of the category of the aesthetic itself within the academy. This chapter focuses on a segment of the US middle class today that self-consciously consumes a particular aesthetic known as Arts and Crafts. The original Arts and Crafts Movement developed in Britain in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and was grounded in Marxist principles, which tied the political to the aesthetic by linking respect for others with an aesthetic sensibility.
