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.
PREFACE CHAPTER ONE The Spectator as Critic as Artist 3 CHAPTER TWO Movies to the Rescue: American Modernism and the Middlebrow Challenge 19 CHAPTER THREE Life on the Edge: Manny Farber and Cult Criticism 30 CHAPTER FOUR Hallucinating Hollywood: Parker Tyler and Camp Spectatorship 49 CHAPTER FIVE From Termites to Auteurs: Cultism Goes Mainstream 73 CHAPTER SIX Heavy Culture and Underground Camp 98 CHAPTER SEVEN Retreat into Theory 122 CONCLUSION Love, Death, and the Limits of Artistic Criticism 150 NOTES 159 REFERENCES 179 INDEX 193
