Travels in hyper reality

Doing some research for Manny's monster due in the next couple of weeks on the end of the world, I just finished reading Eco's essay "Travels in Hyper Reality."
He brings up the philosophy of the Last Beach. Some quotes:
On the compulsive hodge-podge collection habits of those with archival or museum-curator leanings, the constant miscegenation of historical reproductions of art forms alongside other forms not of the same era in a desperate urge to create a fetishized and somehow more-real-than-the-original conception of the past:
"The condition for the amalgamation of the fake and authentic is that there must have been a historic catastrophe, of the sort that has made the divine Acropolis of Athens as venerable as Pompeii, city of brothels and bakeries. And this brings us to the theme of the Last Beach, the apocalyptic philosophy that more or less explicitly rules these reconstructions: Europe is declining into barbarism and something has to be saved."
p. 36
"It is the ideology of preservation, in the New World, of the treasures that the folly and negligence of hte Old World are causing to disappear into the void. Naturally this ideology conceals something- the desire for profit, in the case of the cemetery; and in the case of the Getty, the fact that it is the entrepreneurial colonization by the New World... that makes the Old World's condition critical. Just like the crocodile tears of the Roman patrician who reproduced the grandeurs of the very Greece that his country had humiliated and reduced to a colony. And so the Last Beach ideology develops its thirst for preservation of art from an imperialistic efficiency, but at the same time it is the bad conscience of this imperialistic efficiency..."
p. 39

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