All's Fair in Seville

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FOR ALL THEIR POLYVINYL sheen and electronic gadgetry and spiffy biomorphic shapes, world's fairs are 19th century spectacles. They are celebrations of human (or, anyhow, bourgeois capitalist) confidence, of mechanical ingenuity, of rationality, of progress. The first was staged in London's Crystal Palace in 1851, just as the 19th century was really becoming the 19th century. At the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, Edison exhibited his phonograph, Bell his telephone and Underwood his typewriter.

The 20th century has amply demonstrated machines' nightmare side and thus tended to extinguish that kind of proud, dizzy, uncomplicated hubris. Its last full flowering was a generation ago, when the four full-fledged world's fairs of the postwar era took place back to back, almost continuously: 1958 in Brussels, 1964-65 in New York City, 1967 in Montreal and 1970 in Osaka. And then, in the neo-Luddite, small-is-beautiful era since, we have had nothing -- or nothing but piddling, second-and third-rank expositions that reflected (and self-fulfillingly confirmed) the tapped-out, lowered-expectations zeitgeist.

It may not be morning in America anymore, but in Europe, with communism spent and the trans-Channel tunnel imminent, there is still just enough of the ; upward-and-onward spirit to produce a real old-fashioned (that is, circa 1970) fair in Seville -- although, in line with recent fashion, it is not called a world's fair but Expo '92.

Because a certain kind of modernizing hopefulness fuels such extravaganzas, prospering, postfascist Spain was the inevitable next place for such an event. The Spanish government spent billions on the fair and attendant public works, including a new high-speed bullet train that makes the trip from Madrid to Seville in less than three hours. Like any world's fair, Expo '92 has its fetching gizmos. The 231 IBM touch-screen computer monitors scattered around the 538-acre site are truly useful: a visitor, presented with an aerial photo of Expo, touches anything in the picture and gets a closeup view of the area touched -- and then, with another touch, a still closer view of a particular pavilion or theater. Restaurant reservations can be made on the screens, video messages left for family or friends.

But unlike all recent world's fairs, Expo '92 is not single-mindedly focused on wowing people with visions of the technology-intensive Utopia just around the corner. It is a comparatively backward-looking affair, a pageant of past progress. The official theme is "The Age of Discoveries," and that pretty much means European colonization, featuring full-scale replicas of Columbus' ships. In Europe, Eurocentrism is not yet a bad thing.

Of course, any modern fair is obliged to give frequent lip service to a kind of chipper one-worldism (110 countries have exhibits -- an all-time world's fair record!) and to environmental sensitivity (organizers planted 300,000 shrubs on the site!). Moreover, the gee-whiz, spick-and-span perkiness found in New York's Flushing Meadows in 1964 is strikingly evident in Seville. At any moment, one expects to see teams of Esperanto-speaking U.N. technicians in lab coats disembarking from Hovercraft to brief James Bond.