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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

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 23:30 authored by Elisa María Padilla-Diaz
In 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 Video

ISSN

1050-9208

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

2

Volume

39

Page range

341-359

Department affiliated with

  • Media and Film Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2021-04-08

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2021-04-08

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2021-04-01

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