I see your point -- it's not a particularly uncommon one around here -- but of course I find it questionable, at the very least. If a medium's legitimacy (for lack of a better word) depends on its audience & its mode of presentation, which you seem to be saying, it seems to me that all sorts of problems present themselves. 

Switching creative fields for a moment, would you maintain that -- off the top of my head -- Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward & The Shadow Over Innsmouth were lesser works than The Lurking Fear or Herbert West: Reanimator until at least some point after HPL's death, because those last two achieved magazine publication & the first two didn't? 

Probably not, but I suspect someone who, for some bizarre reason, might "cling desperately, perhaps pathetically, to the definition of a 'short story' or 'novel' as being that which is published in mass format for mixed, mass audiences" would have to agree. 

What about music? Are, say, Joy Division's or the Velvet Underground's oeuvres somehow less than that of, say, Katy Perry because the latter gets radio play & the former never did, especially in the U.S.? For someone who might "cling desperately, perhaps pathetically, to the definition of a 'song' or 'album' as being that which is distributed in public-access format for mixed, mass audiences," I guess that would indeed be the case.

No offense, but what a bizarre way to approach works of creativity. I suppose if Night of the Living Dead or Carnival of Souls had never found a mass audience, they would by definition be something less than ... what ... that Omen remake from a few years back? That's not what you're saying, but it strikes me as the (il)logical extension of the position you describe.

Lord knows, the big-studio addicts here never would've given Romero's or Harvey's films the time of day if this forum had been around 45 years ago, as far as I can tell. And if they came out today instead of in the '60s, I suppose only the same 5 or 6 people here who watch the smaller indie stuff would pay any attention to them, since they'd almost certainly be DtV, while everyone else would still be blathering endlessly about the latest Peter Jackson or Marvel Comics blockbuster, for godssakes. (I'm certainly not the first to make the observation that that DtV is the modern equivalent of the drive-in circuit, & I suppose has been since the latter started going precipitously downhill around the time of, presumably, the rise of VCRs.)






Last Edited By: gef the talking mongoose Nov 28 13 6:26 PM. Edited 3 times.