Initial reviews had it right, IMHO. I remember that book being highly touted in the early 90s and I couldn’t get past the first twenty or thirty pages. And I otherwise liked a lot f stuff from that generation.
The one for me that comes to mind is ABBA going from “guilty pleasure” to solid pop band music aficionados can admit to loving without any sort of qualifier.
Composer Gustav Mahler’s works weren’t very popular for a long time after his death in 1910. (Performances of his stuff was even banned by Germany during their fascist years.)
After 1945 he was discovered by a whole new generation of listeners and became really popular worldwide. He’s still very widely appreciated today.
Here’s an adequate citation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler
As I said it’s true because it’s so general it’s impossible to falsify. Counter examples could always be hand-waved away depending on the definition of “mainstream,” “reviled,” “branded,” etc.
Most artists have been criticized at some point in their careers. Commercially successful artists, especially ones who engage in marketing themselves, will be criticized on ideological grounds simply for that commercialization. And highly successful artists will be a particular target of critics who want to distinguish themselves by being iconoclasts. But this has little to do with the actual quality of their art. As you recognize:
I find your statement that Warhol was “reviled throughout his career” equally baffling. (As I said, it’s extremely misleading without qualifiers.)
However, since you’ve once again brought up the public reception of his art and challenged me to justify my remarks, I’m going to address that. Perhaps you’re nitpicking about the meaning of the “beginning of his career.” Warhol’s first serious show at which he gained a lot of attention was in July 1962. Yes, initially he was widely ridiculed, and the first show was not commercially successful. His set of 32 Campbell soup cans, originally priced at $100 each, sold for $1000 for the lot.
But, per journalist Sara McCorquodale, “Before the end of the year Campbell’s Soup Cans was so on-trend that Manhattan socialites were wearing soup can-printed dresses to high-society events.” By the time of the show known as The American Supermarket opened in October 1964 he was selling individual soup cans paintings for $1,500 each (equivalent to $12,000 today). As I already mentioned, he was commissioned by Time magazine to do a cover on “today’s teenagers” for the Jan 29, 1965 issue, and you don’t get any more mainstream than that. (And his work wasn’t featured to poke fun at some wacky artist, it was selected as an apt style to signify the cultural disruptions that were taking place in the early 1960s.)
So no, he wasn’t immediately accepted the day after the opening of his first show. But within 18 months he was both commercially successful and very widely recognized and popular with the trendier members of the public. I would call that a pretty meteoric rise. Let’s say he was highly successful “from near the beginning of his career” in Pop Art. (He had been a successful commercial artist in the 1950s.)
This Warhol debate is puzzling. He had become quite well known and respected by the early 60s. (Soup Cans was exhibited in 62.) Before that he was merely not well known. By the late 60s he was really quite famous and his works sold for notable amounts.
There was never a point in time when a significant number of critics dismissed his works.
As he got older the quality of his later works weren’t considered so leading edge and all that. But that’s new appraisals of new works. Not a reappraisal of his old stuff.
He was the single most famous modern artist in America for a long period of time.
Kubrick’s The Shining didn’t get good reviews at the time, and initial reviews of the original Omen weren’t so hot either. Carpenter’s The Thing was mentioned in the OP… this seems to happen a lot with horror, it’s not exactly a darling genre among typical movie critics.
Exapno seems to be looking through newspapers rather than reviews in art magazines. A bit of Googling turned up a few reviews and references such as this one from Michael Fried in 1962, which was in general positive about Warhol, though with some criticism, and certainly not “reviling” him.
From here:
Yes. Because **you **were the one who said he was popular with the public. So I checked what sources were available to me to research that. It was a direct response to you.
So. When I talk about critics you introduce the public. Then when I check the public response you tell me I should be talking about critics. Only Leonardo da Vinci could draw circles as perfect as that. Maybe we should be apprising your art.
In any case, there’s a 30-car pileup in ATMB. You should be busy in the mod loop wading through the debris. 
When was that “guilty pleasure” phase? Because ABBA were immensely popular (outside the US) when they were actually making music.
In the case of The Shining, the fact it was a horror film was only part of it – it was also a Kubrick movie. A lot of people forget that Kubrick was a very divisive director during much of his career. Aside maybe for Dr. Strangelove, I don’t think one movie he did during his “auteur” phase (i.e., those from Lolita onward) was met with universal critical acclaim. A common complaint was Kubrick’s movies were too chilly and detached.
As I said, if you believed the public response was irrelevant and you didn’t want to talk about, you should have said so in the first place. I’ve discussed it because you choose to dispute it. And the real reason you’re complaining now is that I demonstrated that your contention that he wasn’t initially popular with the public was quite wrong. You can’t request me to defend a statement and then decide it’s completely irrelevant when I show it’s correct.
But I’ve also demonstrated, with cites, that at least some critics weren’t “reviling” Warhol at the beginning of his career. You’ve ignored these. The best you could do was to say you found few “serious critics” from the period 1962 to 1964 in a scan of newspapers. General circulation newspapers, it should be obvious, are not the best place to look for serous art criticism. Even if they have an art section, the critics are likely to be writing for the general public, not people serious interested in art. They are generally going to be on the conservative side, and not receptive to the avant-garde. There may be exceptions, but reviews by serious critics are more likely to be found in, guess what, magazines devoted to the arts.
The art world is made up not only of critics, but other artists, gallery owners, collectors, and other cognoscenti. An artist’s reception can’t be gauged by critics alone, but whether gallery owners choose to display his works and whether collectors will pay for them. The commercial success of an avant garde artist is in large part part due to critics assuring gallery owners and collectors that their works are important and valuable. So the fact that Warhol’s work was selling for fifty times more in 1963 than it was in 1962 is an indicator that at least some influential critics had seen value in it. (I’ll concede this may not be true of conventional artists like, say, Thomas Kincade, but they are marketing directly to the general public rather than the art world.)
I think the only way to directly assess the “serious” response to Warhol between 1962-1964 would be to look at reviews in “serious” art publications of the time. However, it appears that these resources are not available on line. I can say, though, that the available evidence doesn’t support the contention that Warhol was generally “reviled” even at the start of his career, either by critics or the public.
ABBA were reasonably popular here as well (one #1, four Top 10s, and twenty songs on the Hot 100) , but they were seen mostly as mindless disposable pop when I was growing up. I don’t remember anyone my age growing up admitting to like them (I’m 44.) It wasn’t really until ABBA Gold in the early-to-mid-90s did I see the feelings turn from liking them as a “guilty pleasure” to just straight-up enjoying their melodies, harmonies, and pop sensibilities as something more than just “mere pop.” Perhaps elsewhere the music geeks always lauded them for their brilliance, but that certainly wasn’t the case here in my experience.
I agree. In the seventies, I recall, although ABBA was popular, they were considered just this side of bubble-gum music. Nobody hip would admit to listening to them. Even in 1994, in Muriel’s Wedding Muriel’s enthusiasm for ABBA was used to indicate how un-hip she was. Ironically, that movie and others helped re-ignite interest in them. I have their “Greatest Hits” album, but when I first got it it was definitely a guilty pleasure.
People were right when they said that about disco, and lots of people (myself included) said that about rap. Not so much that it’s the devil’s music as that it would fade in two years.
IMNSHO, rap’s ongoing popularity is in large part because every day, we have a new crop of 12-year-olds who think they’re the first group of kids ever to deliberately annoy and piss off their parents.
Oh agreed 100%, with Freddie at the helm they couldn’t be anything else but flamboyant and OTT but yep, they were always a serious (and seriously considered) rock band and stadium-fillers.
Wikipedia paints a more favorable picture of its initial critical reception:
Wait, am I reading this right - you think disco *faded *after 2 years?
That just displays an ignorance of rap and who listens to it. Rap is mainstream, and global, and its audience has matured along with it.
My experience exactly.
Maybe the Bee Gees fall into a similar category.
So, you were growing up after their active period, is what I’m getting. I mean, you were what, 7 when they broke up?
And that’s different than 70 years of rock and roll how, exactly?
To quote noted music commentator Weird Al Yankovic - covering Nirvana -
A great deal of all youth culture is how it pushes back against the culture that kids get from their parents. That’s exactly how it should be. Whether it’s rap or metal, grunge or sweet 70s soul, making your thing in contrast to those older than you is something that needs to occur.