The underground’s move to higher-rent venues triggered critical backlash

Evidence

Last February’s Andy Warhol Uptight was bad enough, Crowther complained, but “now that their underground has surfaced on West Fifty-Seventh Street and taken over a theater with carpets … it is time for permissive adults to stop winking at their too-precious pranks.” (Increasingly square Crowther sealed his fate, railing against movie violence and obsessing over Bonnie and Clyde, which he panned three times. By January 1968, the sixty-four-year-old critic had been replaced by twenty-nine-year-old novelist Renata Adler.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1967

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s gentrification thesis — the underground surfacing onto West 57th Street (a carpeted theater, higher rent) provoked a backlash from mainstream critics who had tolerated it in its slummy habitat.