I think it's a bad thing when used in a "cheating" way. Often you read a book and a character is described as reading, I dunno, Dostoyevsky, and you are supposed to think "ah intellectual, sensitive" or something; that is a trick often used when the writer is incapable of rendering the character in such a way that you arrive at that understanding organically. This is the feeling I got from High Art I guess.
On the other hand I love references and stuff that make the audience feel smart when you spot 'em because I'm shallow like that although I recognise that this is also a cheap trick to get you on the director's side.
OK, understand where you're coming from. In these cases, I think the references were used primarily to illustrate what the director perceives as the name-dropping culture of that art/art magazine world (inevitably there'll be some of the film world she knows in there, of course). A comparative example: the amount of times Foucault and Derrida are namedropped by academics and wannabe academics is, in my view, quite embarrassing - it is something people genuinely do, despite it making them appear as self-caricatures. And my experience of journalism has been similar. So, I'm inclined to believe that the characters in High Art, while obviously being slightly amped up for satirical reasons, are pretty close to how many people act in that 'world'.
i don't agree about the RM character, and this is probabyl our fundamentla disagreement about the film. To me, she comes across as a naive, somewhat unworldly girl who is in instant thrall to the 'cool' of the Ally Sheedy/Patricia Clarkson group, because she's never been accepted by that kind of 'cool group' before (of course, her acceptance comes gradaully etc etc). By selling out her boyfriend for Ally Sheedy, she's attracted to something illusory in her, and actually is acting like a bit of a bitch, the girl who jsut got accepted by the cool group. but, of course, coolness is something entirely fabricated and often used to hide (major) character flaws, in adult situations just as in high school.
That's roughly my reading of the film, anyways. If the director is suggesting 'depth' by the mentioning of Derrida etc (and I think that's left intentionally ambiguous), then she exposes it as a false depth by the waay she falls for the fake glamour of Sheedy'a hangers-on.
As an aside, I often don't understand the line about 'awful acting', because it suggests a common understanding of what 'good acting' might entail, without expounding on what good acting actually is. Is it meant to be naturalistic? Well, taking Fassbinder as an example, his stuff is often not naturalistic, rather high camp and very melodramatic (stuff I've seen), but I wouldn't say it's 'bad acting'.
