Visitors are mainly concert-goers and I wonder what they will make of Gillian Wearing's My Favourite Track, which is part of a travelling show called "Imagined Communities". The most richly deserved indie success, though, was John Sayles's Lone Star, the beneficiary of a publicity campaign that didn't hesitate to play up the minor role of the suddenly very hot Matthew McConaughey.The old order of stars has every right to feel threatened, with once- safe formulae - Demi Moore undressing (Striptease), Jim Carrey mugging (The Cable Guy) - backfiring. Of the winners Independence Day is comfortably in front (a final US gross of at least $300m looks certain), with Twister a strong runner-up ($238m). As of Labor Day, the official end of summer, three others had crossed the $100m mark: Mission: Impossible ($176m), The Rock ($130m), and, surprisingly, Eddie Murphy's retread of The Nutty Professor ($121m).

Eraser, Phenomenon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and A Time to Kill are all edging towards nine figures. After the folly of Waterworld, thrift is the watchword - thrift by Hollywood standards, at any rate - and the $100m Eraser tops the budget list. The highest profit ratios usually come from art-house breakthroughs, and though nothing matched last year's extremely cheap and inexplicably well-received The Brothers McMullen, there were a few small films that stood their ground, notably Emma, the summer's most lucrative limited release, and Trainspotting, much hyped and a hit in the cities. Studios need a scapegoat and the official line is that the Olympics side-tracked audiences. Lopsided release schedules are a more obvious explanation: sure-fire money-spinners were pushed forward, and the tail end of summer ended up a dumping ground for doubtful outsiders.

Now I've embraced it, it feels sort of powerless."! Beck's new single, 'Devil's Haircut' (Geffen), is out next month He will tour later in the year.. It was supposed to be a prodigious summer at the US box-office, but the early momentum proved to be deceptive. The fireworks of Independence Day were difficult to follow, and recent weeks have seen a sharp downturn in takings with films struggling to break even. Now it's all melding together and kind of homogenising, but at the same time completely splintered."But doesn't Beck's God-given knack for splicing genres in the studio make him Mr Meld and Splinter? Beck looks pained "I guess so, but I don't do it for the sake of doing it. A lot of people embrace technology in order to dismantle everything. There's something disturbing about that to me - that's why I was attracted to folk music in the first place, because technology scared me. It used to be you'd go to different parts of the world and things would be developing in their own rich traditions.

"Someone asked me the other day what it felt like to be a part of the grunge world and I was like 'Wow, I didn't know ... [with withering irony] Maybe in 1996 I'm really gonna go with this grunge thing - I think it has a big future.' "Like Bob Dylan - with whom the unfettered free associations of his lyrics have earned frequent comparison - Beck is both of his time and out of it, mixing millennial modernity with a fearless rejection of current orthodoxy. Like Elvis Presley and Little Jimmy Osmond, Beck is a contradiction on legs: both the gracious recent recipient of the cultural imperialist's legion of honour - an MTV video award - and the author of the immortal line "MTV makes me want to smoke crack"."That's why people like Leadbelly and Elizabeth Cotton are so important," he insists, "because their voices speak so directly to us of all the things we've lost with the advent of mass media and global communication. The musical style he pioneered on 1994's Mellow Gold and refined with Odelay (which he still considers "really crude") is an intoxicating hybrid of ancient and modern - lazy drum and slide-guitar loops, harmonica flourishes, whistling - frenzy and languor. He now finds himself the unelected figurehead of a loose coalition of principled mavericks - Ben Harper leads the blues division, Vic Chesnutt and Will Oldham boss the country/folk paddock, the Fugees rule the rap school - currently showing American music the way out of the grunge and gangsta malaise.This makes it doubly ironic that those who failed to see the sarcasm in his hilarious 1994 breakthrough anthem "Loser" (written two years before Nirvana's Nevermind came out, but not released till two years afterwards) should persist in crowning Beck "King of the Slackers" He rolls his eyes. "I remember just being so immersed in it and so passionate about it," he says, "and everyone around me not having the slightest interest." Oddly enough, it was the cacophonous iconoclasm of New York noise band Pussy Galore that convinced him that "purism was a dead end", and there was more to continuing the tradition of country pioneers the Carter Family than learning to play note-perfect approximations of Maybelle's guitar solos."I guess every few years some band comes along and connects to the primal violent energy that is the essence of rock," Beck observes solemnly. Surely today's Styrofoam receptacle is the antique china of tomorrow: isn't it always the music that is most easily written off by contemporaries - Phil Spector, punk, Abba, Black Sabbath - that proves most enduring in the end? "Exactly.

I'm sure when John Lee Hooker came out he was regarded as disposable, but now he's like the earth - something you'd plant seeds and grow things really deep in. That's why I'd never fool myself into romanticising the music I love: making it clean and nostalgic would seem very vulgar."In mid-1980s New York, when a teenage Beck fell upon the music of Blind Blake and Woody Guthrie as a hungry sheepdog might fall upon a discarded pancake roll, folk was a four-letter word. Compared to the folk and blues which first inspired him to pick up an acoustic guitar, music that uses computer and sampling technology is, Beck insists, "not all that substantial". But isn't music music, no matter how it's made? "It's the difference between a Styrofoam cup and an old porcelain crafted thing - they both perform the same function, but in terms of richness, there's no comparison."If it seems strange that a young man whose music surfs the floodtide of modernity with such blissful ease should vouchsafe such a conservative opinion, that's because it is.