Artists, Auteurs, and Star. On the Human Factor in the Culture Industry
Diedrich Diederichsen

The auteur was perhaps the last model of an artist from the old Europe standing specifically for cinema as an art. The idea behind the term was that it was still possible to maintain individual handwriting and that the individual-responsible proportion of a film was the crucial, i.e. artistic element, even when dealing with a gigantic economical, technical and hierarchical-social apparatus. The cinema could only fall into the category of art at the price of an idea of authorship. The cinema's problems have arrived in fine art in two respects: on the one hand in increased reflection about the cinema/film medium at the centre of fine art. Secondly the problems that led to the auteur formula now affect the core of the art context: artistic productions are increasingly dependent on private donors and sponsors, producers and executive producers. But the author is only one way of identifying the subjective element, others would start with the spectators, actors and of course media technology. Examples are in the form of four sets of author policies: Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and Julian Schnabel in which an alternative cinema questions the first cinema about the subjective factor [more]

1. The Auteur 2. Counter-images: Art and Cinema 3. Kenneth Anger 4. Jack Smith 5. Andy Warhol 6. The «Arteur» 8. Star-quality