If we’re talking about the opinions of critics and not how well it did at the box office, Psycho apparently got mixed reviews when it was first released. At least in part because it was so popular with audiences, it was reevaluated, and is now generally considered to be one of Hitchcock’s greatest works.
That critical acknowledgement of Warhol now isn’t as much of a reversal as you’d seem to indicate, more a case of one half of an argument winning out in the end.
I don’t recall this TV movie – I’ll have to look it up.
I’ve written about Song of Hiawatha before. It’s complex. It fits this thread because critical appraisal of it has changed over the years. Longfellow was trying to create an “American” epic, and thus turned to Native American Mythology, researching it heavily and getting most of it right (at least, as far as Ojibwe myth goes, although he was wrong in thinking the historical Hiawatha was identical with the myth-hero Manebozho). He took a lot of flak for doing this, from folks whop thought that it wasn’t seemly to use savage myths in an American epic. Time has vindicated him on that, I think. Longfellow rightly presented native legend as truly American.
On the other hand, he used the meter of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his basis, and he re-arranged and reshaped the myths to fit his narrative and style. I think Native Americans take issue with that. as I’ve remarked before, Song of Hiawatha and James Fenimore Cooper’s novels are the ultimate sources for a lot of our ideas of what “Indians” and their culture are like, and in forming our stereotypes. I’d say that the meter of Indian poetry would seem to be a minor part of all that, but it’s not. Despite Longfellow falling in popularity, the poem casts a long shadow that we’re still living in, and part of that is the way Indian song and myths go. I still encounter things that assume Hiawatha is typical of this, and it’s not.
So, yeah, there’s a love/hate relationship there between Native Americans and Song of Hiawatha.
This is a highly misleading statement at best, so much so that without some kind of qualifier can simply be considered wrong. Sure some critics reviled him, but he was also favored by other critics from the start. I would say he was highly controversial rather than reviled. He was highly successful both with the public and many critics from the start of his career in what came to be considered “Pop Art” in the early sixties.
I’d say rather that Warhol became a cult artist after 1962. Most mainstream critics reacted much the way the mainstream French critics treated the the now-famous non-representationists from the impressionists onward. Tom Wolfe and Robert Hughes famously hammered him. His films, from *Sleep *to Chelsea Girls, appealed to a tiny fringe of the art community and hardly anyone else. After 1970, true, he had a reputation, which he promptly trashed by commissioning others to paint the works he signed, causing huge uproars in the art world.
I browsed through newspaper.com for mentions of Warhol from the 1962-1964 period that shot him to stardom. Few serious art critics were to be found, admittedly. The articles I did read mostly treated him with bemusement, in both its amused and confused senses. He was something the New York art world had let loose on society and they had no idea why.
I saw no evidence “he was highly successful … with the public.” Can you back up that statement with any contemporary cites?
I’m not going to devote a lot of time to researching this, since my main point was that your statement that he was “reviled throughout his career” was highly misleading without a qualifier. But are you seriously denying that Warhol was commercially successful? His original works AFAIK sold well, and by the mid 1960s as I recall his images were featured on posters and t-shirts for sale, especially those of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. By January 1965 he was commissioned by Time to do a cover on “today’s teenagers,” something I think indicates he was both immediately recognizable and popular with the general public.
One thing that Warhol was good at was marketing himself and his art. By 1970 one of his Campbell Soup can pictures set a new record by selling for $60,000. His financial success is what allowed him to start dabbling in film, which was much less successful. But by the time of his death he was worth $400 million.
When the movie “Jerry Maguire” was released in the late 1990s, it was hailed as “THE GREATEST CINEMATIC EFFORT EVER” yada yada yada, and while I did enjoy it when I saw it in the theater, I knew that it heavily dated itself and would probably fade into the woodwork of Good But Not Great Movies within a few years, which indeed it did.
It did, however, spawn this.
http://www.jerrymaguirepyramid.com/
which I found while searching for this.
I wonder if anyone has done the same thing with "Mrs. Doubtfire" tapes. :pEarlier in their very successful 41-year career, Rush were almost universally reviled by critics, and not so much now, or at least not from what I have seen.
Warhol was a brand name after a certain point in his career.* I’m not sure what that has to do with critical reappraisals. Norman Rockwell was the most popular painter in America for decades, yet the art world hated him every minute of that time. His reputation has entirely changed today and he’s regarded as a master, but I wouldn’t hesitate to say that he was reviled for much of his career. (Have I been to the Norman Rockwell Museum? Yes, I have. It’s wonderful.)
I made what I thought was the obvious assumption that in a thread titled, “What were the biggest critical reappraisals?” popular success was not one of the issues. If you want to use that totally opposite set of goalposts, then start a properly titled thread. Me, I’m going to continue talking about critical reappraisals whether you approve or not.
*I’d make the generalization that every artist in every field who became a brand name was reviled by the critical mainstream. (That’s an overstatement, obviously, but has a high percentage of hits. Rock music is a bit of an exception, since major groups normally have high critical approval, but brand name soloists do not: look at Elton John or Billy Joel or Neil Diamond or Cher.) Some have been rethought, many haven’t. Rockwell didn’t get it until after he died. Stephen King got it after a mere 40 years or so. Brand names can take consolation while gazing upon their bankbooks, though.
Who regards him as a “master”? A master illustrator, sure, but the fine arts community still regards him as, at best, a guilty pleasure. There are cartoonists with more fine arts street cred than Rockwell (Steig, Steinberg, Dedini, Frank King’s Gasoline Alley Sunday pieces, etc.). And yes, the Norman Rockwell Museum is a day well spent.
What about the genre of rock music. You know, that “devil’s music” that was a “fad that would fade in two years”?
Now it’s considered a classic genre of music that will live forever.
:dubious::dubious::dubious:You’ve got to be kidding me. I happened to mention in passing that Warhol was successful with the public, and you acted like this was something that needed documentation rather than being a matter of common knowledge.
You were the one who made it an issue. If you thought it was irrelevant, you could have said so in the first place.
I take this as an acknowledgement that he was, in fact, successful with the public.
As for the rest, you’re moving the goal posts and defining away exceptions to your statement. Of course mainstream critics wouldn’t approve of an avant garde artist at the beginning of his career. That’s why they are mainstream critics. Avant garde artists are generally discovered and publicized by avant garde critics. Mainstream critics begin to approve of them once they’ve started to become mainstream.
As for Rockwell (who I like, by the way*), his case was pretty much the opposite of Warhol: he was seen as being too conventional rather than avant garde. I wouldn’t say he was “reviled” by contemporary critics rather than simply ignored. He was primarily considered an illustrator rather than a fine artist. While his reputation now may have improved somewhat, I don’t think anyone considers him a major influence on 20th Century art, certainly not of the significance of Warhol. Whether or not he was reviled by some critics, Warhol had a major influence on 20th Century art.
Picasso? Dali? O’Keefe? This statement is so broad that it becomes pretty much meaningless. I’m sure you can argue that it’s true by simply defining who you consider the “critical mainstream.”
Once again, I am taking issue with your statement that Warhol was “reviled throughout his career.” You have to add “by some critics” to make that other than misleading. And that statement is true of many artists, even the best.
*I regard Rockwell as kind of like Currier and Ives prints or Breugel (though admittedly the latter is critically acclaimed) in presenting iconic depictions of the prevailing culture of a particular time and place. Rockwell was exceptionally skillful at that, and as such I admire him.
Critics loathed Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Even the record label hated it…
And then along comes a little movie called ‘Wayne’s World’…
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I can argue that it’s true, because it is.
Look, the art world is a very large and amorphous thing, even when slotted by genres of art. One has to resort to generalities about critics because they make their bones by denouncing the opinions of everyone who preceded them. I think of them like the Supreme Court, which, in the most public cases, seems to do nothing but overturn whatever their earlier rulings had been. That’s actually a good thing because the Constitution, like culture, is a living thing and the world we live in changes faithfully decade by decade. We should be reappraising artists every decade just as we should be revisiting law regularly.
I still find your insistence that Warhol was successful both with critics and the public from the beginning to be baffling. That doesn’t accord with any history of the New York art scene, or avant garde art, or movies, or popular culture, or anything I’m vaguely familiar with. Of course opinions of Warhol changed over time: why else mention him in a thread about reappraisals? I include him because he was considered a weirdo even by art standards until the avant became passe.
I recall Van Halen being slagged off in the early days. Some praise for Eddie’s guitar playing (“but he’s no Hendrix”), but not much else. I think it was Rolling Stone that dismissed Van Halen II with “the music shows as much imagination as the album’s title.” By the time of *1984 *and “Jump”, they had ascended to guilty pleasure status for some critics. (I recall a review calling “Jump” a great piece of ear-candy.) But post Hagar and all the 80s Sunset Strip hair bands, they (at least the Dave era) are actually respected.
I also was amused to reread the LA Times’ absolute trashing of Guns N Roses’ * Appetite For Destruction*, basically writing it off as the debut from yet another interchangeable hair band. Many other critics has similar opinions. Jump ahead a year, Clint Eastwood sticks “Welcome to the Jungle” in “Dirty Harry 5: The One With The Toy RC Car Chase”, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is a hit a year after the album’s release, and suddenly the LA Times is praising the album to the heavens.
The Cars seemed to go full circle. At the time of their debut, critics loved them and grouped them in with Talking Heads, Blondie and Elvis Costello as the pinnacle of new wave. In the 1990s/2000s, opinion had shifted to “great debut album, followed by a string of inconsequential early-MTV hits, and nothing else worth mentioning. And they sucked live”. With the Hall of Fame induction and Ocasek’s passing, we’ve gone back to “They were pretty good after all. But they still sucked live”.
And many years later we come full circle:
Live Aid came well before Wayne’s World and it has always been a huge and much loved hit in the UK. Queen are probably critic-proof anyway due to them being pretty much a knowing self-parody.
Queen’s *image *may have been knowing self-parody, but they always took their actual music very seriously.
*Forrest Gump *won the Oscar and was loved by many (although I hated it from Day One). But time has not been kind to it:
John Carpenter’s The Thing was panned by critics and made $19M on a $15M budget.
Now it frequently makes lists of best horror movies of all time.
I only read this link but the writer’s complaints are largely as terrible as she finds the film. To just pick the first example:
Wait, she’s unfamiliar with the idea that some people with neurological conditions aren’t always socially adept and might go on at length about things the listener isn’t really interested in? And the only excuse she can find for this is that Gump must be a “relentless narcissist”? Really? And it doesn’t get any better from there.
There’s plenty of room to dislike the treacly Forrest Gump but this article sounds more like either missing half the points or else is just clickbaiting by saying a popular thing is actually terrible.