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

"ARTISTS IN THE AUDIENCE rightly indicts highbrow film scholars for their aversion to discernment and their unwillingness to offer comprehensible aesthetic guidance. Implicit in this critique is the belief that the moment is ripe for a new vanguard to emerge, a radical intelligentsia willing to engage cinema as a powerful artistic medium. Until critics recognize that sublime art and progressive politics are not mutually exclusive, we are doomed to endure a middlebrow culture in which the American Film Institute ranks FORREST GUMP and TOOTSIE among the hundred best films of all time and neither GREED nor SUNSHINE makes the list. Taylor facetiously suggests that the former works may indeed be great movies. Given the current state of highbrow criticism, he asks, how could we possibly know otherwise?"Taylor, Greg is the author of 'Artists in the Audience Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism', published 2001 under ISBN 9780691089553 and ISBN 0691089558.