Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism.

Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism.

Greg Taylor

Language: English

Pages: 208

ISBN: 0691004218

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Gone with the Wind an inspiration for the American avant-garde? Mickey Mouse a crucial source for the development of cutting-edge intellectual and aesthetic ideas? As Greg Taylor shows in this witty and provocative book, the idea is not so far-fetched. One of the first-ever studies of American film criticism, Artists in the Audience shows that film critics, beginning in the 1940s, turned to the movies as raw material to be molded into a more radical modernism than that offered by any other contemporary artists or thinkers. In doing so, they offered readers a vanguard alternative that reshaped postwar American culture: nonaesthetic mass culture reconceived and refashioned into rich, personally relevant art by the attuned, creative spectator.

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their stance was still implicitly political, to be sure; it engaged the vanguard tradition’s aesthetic activism (its forcible reengagement of art with the praxis of life) as convincingly as the prewar factions ever had. There were, after all, other options for critics interested in the movies. One could simply assess Hollywood films for entertainment value. Alternatively, one might aim to apply more traditional (even traditionally modernist) standards of discernment to the broader field of

margins and adjusting her taste objects, or aesthetic, accordingly. It is easier to adjust one’s taste objects, but this is possible only when one’s aesthetic remains marginal: Farber could support Kimber Smith and Robert DeNiro as vital fringe alternatives to the lethargic abstract expressionists because the latter had abandoned the authentic margins for the creature comforts of middle-class life. The acceptance of one’s aesthetic by others, however, proves much trickier to handle. The cultist

Electra complex, and a key Freudian concept, displacement: Mildred imagines herself as Veda, in love with her own father, Mildred’s husband, as Mildred was in love with her father. The passionate desire to give Veda everything, to see her grow up happy and successful in every way, is an ordinary case of displacement; paradoxically Mildred wants to give her every charm and chance to accomplish that which she was prevented from accomplishing, union with her father. But the desertion of Mildred by

the appropriate critical approaches. In practice, two such approaches have dominated: I shall term them cultism and camp. Though similar in many important respects, these perspectives need to be distinguished clearly. Cult criticism focuses on the identification and isolation of marginal artworks, or aspects and qualities of marginal artworks, that (though sorely neglected by others) meet the critic’s privileged aesthetic criteria. Often the marginal cult object is not a traditional artwork at

splendor of a marketing campaign, the critic shrouds it in an oppositional or ironic perspective designed to make a virtue of its limitations. Popular movies make terrific vanguard material because most can be assumed to be without much inherent value in the first place; this is why more difficult, seemingly autonomous films have always posed a problem for cultist/camp use. Farber, we may recall, rejected the American experimentalists of the 1940s outright. Sarris’s auteur theory may have

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