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

Greg Taylor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Could someone tell me what critics are for?" the director Tom DiCillo once asked, wearing the kind of jovial grimace you might expect from the guy behind Living in Oblivion. A little stuffy and academic, Artists in the Audience nevertheless defends the role of those among us who watch, react, and report. Taking as his heroes two avant-garde critics, Greg Taylor traces our own obsession with camp and cult movies to their beginnings. Parker Tyler, a poet who wrote for View, and Manny Farber, a painter who reviewed films for The Nation, were Greenwich Village bohemians who sought highbrow delight (or "weightier entertainment value," as Tyler put it) along the margins. Starting in the 1940s, Farber and Tyler began to hold movies up to more serious scrutiny, but at the same time they groomed their readers to resist middle-class values by grooving on the Wildean fringes, "the aesthetically incomplete, fractured, uncontrolled"--Plan 9 from Outer Space over, say, Mildred Pierce. As apostles of cinematic energy they anticipate Pauline Kael and Film Comment. But they mainstreamed giddiness too, championing what Dan Aykroyd's twitchy theater maven in Saturday Night Live skits of the 1970s called the "deliciously bad." Finally, their desire to shake up conventional notions of taste à la Jackson Pollack and Andy Warhol relates to our present wassailing in cultural debris--in psychotronic Z-budget movies, in bad-for-you TV, and in academic panels devoted to teasing out the deconstruction of gender role-playing in The Valley of the Dolls. --Lyall Bush --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Taylor (Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film, SUNY at Purchase) uses the careers of pioneering cult critic Manny Farber and camp critic Parker Tyler as the basis for an examination and brief history of vanguard film criticism. This revolutionary criticism made the artistic value of a piece or the intentions of the artist unimportantAwhat mattered was the critic's uniquely personal impressions of the work and his creation or interpretation of relevant meaning from it. Taken from the art world, the approach was a reaction to consumer-friendly, "middlebrow" postwar modernism, and the vibrant American popular movie was the perfect material. These writers paved the way for the better-known critics who followed them, before vanguard criticism retreated into academia. Recommended for academic collections.AMarianne Cawley, Charleston Cty. Lib., SC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (October 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691089558
• ISBN-13: 978-0691089553
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #981,339 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The book is fascinating and down-right awe-inspiring., June 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism. (Hardcover)

I've said it before. I'll say it again...flug. That's right folks, flug, and a most interesting one at that. With all seriousness, this books kicks major a--! I would have it surgically attached to my thigh if possible. If you want to know what I mean about flug, read the book...trust me!

2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The book is fascinating and down-right awe-inspiring., June 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism. (Hardcover)

I've said it before. I'll say it again...flug. That's right folks, flug, and a most interesting one at that. With all seriousness, this books rule! I would have it surgically attached to my thigh if possible.