Smith’s Flaming Creatures invented an aesthetic that was simultaneously primitive and sophisticated

Evidence

Flaming Creatures lit up the underground with phosphorescent joy. Something new under the sun, it proposed a novel form of cine-glamour—one that owed everything and nothing to Hollywood. Smith’s movie was at once primitive and sophisticated, hilarious and poignant, spontaneous and studied, frenzied and languid, crude and delicate, avant and nostalgic, gritty and fanciful, fresh and faded, innocent and jaded, high and low, raw and cooked, underground and camp, black and white and white on white, composed and decomposed, richly perverse and gloriously impoverished. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 432

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the book’s core thesis about material conditions — here the artistic product itself, not the conditions producing it.