Introduction: Cinema’s Grey Spaces
Art historical interpretations of the production and exhibition of moving-image works in art spaces often rest on a reductive oppositional pairing of the “white cube” of the museum or gallery space and the “black box” of the movie theatre. This introduction challenges that approach, arguing that new methods and research drawn from media and cultural studies—rather than art history—are critical to contextualizing the origins and significance of such art. It demonstrates how these works and the terms of their display may diverge from the standards of the move theatre while including aspects of other forms of popular film and video culture, from the drive-in to the peep show. It concludes by laying the groundwork for a more inclusive and historically rooted approach to the relationship between art and popular media, one better suited to identifying and measuring the artistic influence of an extraordinary range of popular media forms and practices.