The Baltimore Artist Taste Class and Distinction in John Waters Pecker.pdf (1.54 MB)
The Baltimore artist: taste, class, and distinction in John Waters’ Pecker
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 23:30 authored by Elisa María Padilla-DiazIn John Waters’ Pecker (1998), an amateur young photographer is discovered by a New York art dealer and becomes an overnight sensation in the art world. When he is recognized as an artist, however, the spontaneous snapshots he used to take -of his abnormal friends and relatives, of his local striptease and gay clubs, of Baltimore’s buses, fast-food joints and alleys- are no longer accessible to him. Surreptitiously alluding to the photography of Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, Pecker illustrates conflicts between taste, class, and distinction. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that the film shows how taste organizes the social world and parodies the ways in which outsider art constitutes a type of social capital. Through textual analysis, this article argues that Pecker illustrates Baltimore as a queer site and explores the meta-reflectivity of the text, as Pecker’s art mirrors Waters’ authorship. Pecker represents, I argue, an interesting case study to comprehend Waters’ humour and operations of taste and authorship in the lesser known and studied years of his filmmaking career (post Hairspray, 1988).
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Published version
Journal
Quarterly Review of Film and VideoISSN
1050-9208Publisher
Taylor & FrancisExternal DOI
Issue
2Volume
39Page range
341-359Department affiliated with
- Media and Film Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2021-04-08First Open Access (FOA) Date
2021-04-08First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2021-04-01Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedLicence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC