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

Gone with the Windan 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 Audienceshows 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.

Greg Tayloris Assistant Professor in the Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film at Purchase College, State University of New York. The educated public has known for years that vanguard film theory is one part self-indulgence, two parts hoodwinking. Taylor's study shows precisely how and why the interpreters lost touch within the medium. ---Jacob M. Appel,Boston Book Review Taylor constructs a detailed history of some of the most salient trends in Post-World War II American cinema and film criticism. . . . [His] points are well-taken and his analyses convincingly argued. ---Robert L. Cagle,afterimage Lively, provocative reading. . . . This is a gripping saga as Taylor tells it, carefully constructed and lucidly written. ---David Sterritt,Cineaste Greg Taylor's intriguing study of film critics takes both a discriminating and aesthetic approach to the subject. . . . An illuminating book. Greg Taylor'sArtists in the Audienceis one of the more innovative works of cinema studies that I have read in some time. It's essential reading for anyone interested in the history and theory of film criticism, and it touches as well on important issues in art history and cultul“•