Written by Georgia Smith
“What do we do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” questions memoirist Claire Dederer in the title of her percipient, rousing piece for the Paris Review. She opens this piece of writing, published in late 2017, and her recent book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma identically, detailing a list of Hollywood’s – and Western pop culture’s – most renowned monsters: sex-pests, rapists, abusers, and racists. Think the likes of Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, and Pablo Picasso. As one of those individuals who “did or said something awful, and made something great”, Polanski proves a particularly salient case for Dederer herself, the idea of his cinematic brilliance and the fact of his rape of a thirteen-year-old utterly unfathomable as two elements of the same biography.
It is this exact idea of biography which fascinates Dederer. Her writing presupposes that it is the disposition of the modern fan to crave biographic detail, seeking it out as an object of both fascination and disgust. The way in which an artist’s work is “stained” or “disrupted” by their biography defines Dederer’s thinking on art consumption and the experience of being a fan. To Dederer there are two forms of disruption: the first a sense of overwhelming disgust, making the consumption of the artist’s work ethically impossible. The second is less vitriolic, necessitating the intellectual contortions of separating art from artist. It is the second form which appears most seductive to Dederer.
The impulse to consume “good art” – art which is morally and ethically sound – is often imagined as a collective imperative, marked by our particular obsession with the debate over separating the art from the artist. What should “we” do about the problem of ethical art consumption? Dederer sees this form of collectivism as particularly insidious; it is a marked attempt at moral evasion. As she proposes, “we is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking on the mantle of easy authority.” It is also, as Dederer notes as part of her shrewd study of the sexed nature of art criticism, a shorthand for a “middle-brow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think.” It is a substantiation of accepted authority and a rejection of intuitive sensibilities.
Yet, beyond affirming systems of power there are reasons for our obsession with ethical art consumption which are decidedly solipsistic. Dederer writes, “when you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it.” This accounts for the continued cultural fascination with the museum or gallery as what Dederer perceives to be “a site of great beauty but also of moral drama” (Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle being a significant reference in her works). In light of this idea of “moral drama”, one of Dederer’s most convincing qualities is her openness in discussing immorality and its inevitable allure. On the subject of unethical art, she admits: “I want these things. I drink in the spectacle of bad behaviour”. She elaborates further, suggesting that “I suppose this is the human condition, this sneaking suspicion of our own badness. It lies at the heart of our fascination with people who do awful things.”
The brilliance of Dederer’s work is the way in which she cleverly underlines a new ethics through which to consume art whilst refusing to smother her readers in an unnecessary moralism. Her ethics are sensuous, indulging not in logical responses to art but emotional ones. As such, understanding that what are often perceived to be “ethical thoughts” about art are in fact “moral feelings” which originate in the individual “someplace more elemental than thought.” To Dederer, individuals are involved with art in a way which is fundamentally “governed by emotion, emotion around which we (then) arrange language.”
Her book is what she tentatively calls the “autobiography of the fan”. Dederer’s own subjectivity or persona as a writer is essential to the success of Monsters. A sort of metaphysical proof of the importance of her work. She possesses a certain colloquialism, and passages of her writing are deeply comedic, yet her prose always remains exact. To be a fan is to sacrifice at least part of oneself, it is the formation of a relationship after all, even if that relationship is a parasocial one. Fans come to base essential elements of their identity upon the artists they worship. Speaking of her relationship to the works of Polanski, namely Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Dederer writes “like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does.” Polanski causes Dederer such hurt because even though art is not the unfolding of a single “theological” meaning, fans still want or have come to expect a God. This is the same impulse Greenwell seeks to understand in his recent work of critical genius A Moral Education: “on the one hand we want art to be free, and on the other we want it to mean.”
How we imagine genius is intimately tied to the positioning of the artist as a God. Imagining genius is not necessarily concerned with the intellectual quality of a work, but more often the capacity to give forth a sense of bodily freedom defined by inconsistency and to foster the image of a reckless propensity for play. Dederer states “maybe we have created the idea of genius to serve our own attraction to badness”. Marcel Duchamp (notable apparently for more than the image of him playing chess with the naked Eve Babitz) is profoundly important to conceptual art yet his failures to embody the sexuality of genius have had significant implications for his public legacy. Genius is evidently defined by much more than intellectuality. Authority is perhaps the singular most important thread which can be traced through Dederer’s work. Interpretations of the work of Pablo Picasso, contemporary of Duchamp, are perhaps the most emblematic of the tendency to overlook questionable biography for the sake of aestheticism. When Dederer writes “Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure)” she could have been writing explicitly on the subject of Picasso.
In a shift from her singular focus on the monstrously masculine, the final part of Dederer’s book is composed of three elegant chapters on neglectful female artists: Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell and Muriel Sparks primarily. This idea of neglect is important to Dederer. Leaning on Walter Benjamin’s assertion that “at the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.” Dederer interrogates the unique barbarism of the mother as a particularly alluring instance of the artist’s “selfishness”. She notes that “there are many qualities one must possess to be a working writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity… but first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness.” In framing “selfishness” as a kind of monstrosity, Dederer again expands the idea of what it means to consume art, or more importantly to consume art ethically. Viewing art is then about a continual recognition, negotiation, and renegotiation of what one deems to be offensive or transgressive, ethical and pleasurable. Dederer makes us ask ourselves if sex is a primary factor in what we perceive to be artistically permissible.
Dederer’s work is simultaneously a striking affront to the conventions of thinking on the ethics of art and a profoundly funny, deeply personal and gloriously entertaining piece of writing. What then is the answer to the question at the center of Dederer’s book? Her answer is not definite, but it involves understanding and writing from that place “more elemental than thought”, a place perhaps lodged in the body or the most subjective parts of the mind which should be understood as a place of profound critical potential. Dederer supplements bored art history discourses with dynamic, human responses to the fact of art as produced by individuals, individuals with potentially contentious personal histories.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press. pp. 142 – 149.
Dederer, Claire. 2023. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. London: Sceptre.
Dederer, Claire. ‘What do we do with the Art of Monstrous Men?’ The Paris Review, November 20, 2017. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/11/20/art-monstrous-men/
Greenwell, Garth. A Moral Education: In Praise of Filth. The Yale Review, March 20, 2023. https://yalereview.org/article/garth-greenwell-philip-roth
Featured image credit: “Picasso” by Kristin Myers Harvey is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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