Artists in the Audience

by Taylor, Greg

• ISBN13: 9780691004211
• ISBN10: 0691004218
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-08-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

"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.

Author Biography

Greg Taylor is assistant professor in the Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film at Purchase College, State University of New York.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
The Spectator as Critic as Artist	3	(16)
Movies to the Rescue: American Modernism and the Middlebrow Challenge	19	(11)
Life on the Edge: Manny Farber and Cult Criticism	30	(19)
Hallucinating Hollywood: Parker Tyler and Camp Spectatorship	49	(24)
From Termites to Auteurs: Cultism Goes Mainstream	73	(25)
Heavy Culture and Underground Camp	98	(24)
Retreat into Theory	122	(28)
Conclusion Love, Death, and the Limits of Artistic Criticism	150	(9)
Notes	159	(20)
References	179	(14)
Index	193