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

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: Greg Taylor
• | Publisher: Princeton University Press
• | Publication Date: Aug 26, 2001
• | Number of Pages: 208 pages
• | Binding: Paperback or Softback
• | ISBN-10: 0691089558
• | ISBN-13: 9780691089553