Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer review – what’s your cancellation policy? Rachel Cooke, The Guardian, 2023.
I happened to be called an artist. Not often, but it happened. And every time, I felt a shiver of annoyance—a cold sweat like when you're about to vomit, and you don't—because being called an artist makes me vomit, even if I don't.
I met hundreds of people who proudly called themselves artists. A very small number of them are people who have not yet fully understood the art market or contemporary art; they simply do what they like—however naive it may be—feeling misunderstood because no one appreciates them and trying to survive with great imagination because they don't have any money.
The remaining part - the largest - are people who know both the art market and contemporary art well because they have spent their lives drinking prosecco at vernissages, who dress in beggars' clothes and living like someone who can't make ends meet despite coming from a middle-upper class and having the apartment paid for by family income. They often feel like they are prophets or visionaries; as custodians of a sensitivity inaccessible to the average person, they also feel the duty to mark a qualitative difference between them and the rest of the world. At least, they try to convey this to divert attention from their art's secret unmoving driving force: the abysmal, disturbing, sublime terror of having to work to make a living.
Some of them, those who consider themselves more intellectual, dress entirely in black, like priests, judges, and gravediggers. It is their uniform, the mark of their seriousness: black is the result of their profound dialogue with the meaning of an existence they have never taken lightly. And so they mourn. Their face is also always in mourning, like all those who take the meaning of existence and themselves too seriously.
Some of them pose as people with social relation disorders: they appear confused and disordered because it is the label of their "artisticness"; "we are dreamers, abstract people." They present themselves like this. Therefore, they do not arrive on time for appointments or forget them, they do not respect deadlines, they present projects without attention to detail, and they do not clean the places they inhabit. Very often, they say inappropriate things, sometimes unfriendly, because they believe that sincerity is a lack of filter and hurting the feelings of others is necessarily the price of honesty.
Even if what they say doesn't have the flavor of truth but of exhibition. Many of them show themselves as heavy drinkers; they make a big show of their drunkenness, pulling skeletons out of closets, even where there are no closets.
The reason for this behavior is often the passive internalization of the myth of genius: talented people must also be a little strange or tormented. Many mistake this myth - a mere cultural construct - in a sort of equivalence: genius = freak, so they think they are automatically taken for talented people if they act like freaks. Sometimes, their “freakness” is just the fact that they come from high-class families, and the pseudo-relational disorder that characterizes them is the
inability to relate to people with backgrounds different from theirs.
They frequent cultural circles where they meet people like them or people who are impressionable by people like them, where they can show off their knowledge, all quickly put on display so that the tone of the conversation can remain "high" right from the start: they talk just about books, films, exhibitions, travels, human issues; generally without having an honest opinion on anything but repeating what others have said, saying what you expect should be said, showing themselves scandalized by scandals and excited by the things there is to be excited about; ending up
complaining about their own life or speaking badly about the lives of others.
The choice of words they use ranges from bombastic to obsolete, not due to stylistic choice but to show how many "strange" words they know. They use the exact "strange" words when they explain their works, preferring complex syntaxes full of subordinate clauses, where a touch of baroque and a lot of metaphysics emerge because the artists want to amaze their audience and, at the same time,
prevent them from understanding the content of their work. Usually, it is because the content isn't there.
I found this same way of speaking, this vain babbling, in Claire Dederer's book. In “Monsters,” there are no pleonastic expressions or mannerisms, but you tend to say things as you expect them to be said without saying anything.
Reading this book is a bit like being at one of the many provincial vernissages where I met the hundreds of artists I’ve talked about and where, glass in hand, you spend the time acting as a moral-minded individual between one self-reference and another.
I bought “Monsters” because it was presented as the literary case of the year and sponsored in the window of a radical and feminist bookshop in London. I had been thinking for months about how to deal with the "monsters"—people who committed crimes but who are still exhibited in museums and studied in history books—especially if I have to teach their art to young students searching for models to follow. I was looking for a perspective that would help me.
“Monsters” certainly offers an interesting perspective, but just on the mentality of an upper-class American woman, incredibly focused on herself, particularly her fabulous house in the middle of an island that she bought to save herself from the distractions of the city. The book is full of references to her home, in which the author spent weeks glued to the screen watching Chinatown on a loop and wondering about the meaning of art between one cup of tea and another.
These are the only details that stick in my mind after reading her book. Apart from this, and the countless references to her professional success, mastodontic artistic
ambitions, and relational difficulties with colleagues of the opposite sex, the book proposes questions, always the same, from beginning to end. It touches on the problems instead of raising them and goes around in circles holding hands with clichés, many of which are dangerous.
It seems that Dederer, after having presented Picasso as a man who spent his life beating up his ex-girlfriends and putting cigarettes in their faces, fishes out the Christian maxim of "who is without sin cast the first stone" and tells her audience: “who are we to judge? In the end, each of us is a bit of a monster!”
Instead of focusing on how to deal with the emblematic and delicate relationship between the artists' lives and their artworks, Dererer shifts the focus first on the judgment that the public is asked to make on both and then on the fact that we are all human and no one is without blemish.
Undoubtedly, it is an actual point, but what does this have to do with the History of Art and the fact that people who committed crimes are still the symbols of our culture? What are we talking about?
As the cherry on top, Dererer concludes the last chapter using a chilling image: she compares the love of monsters’ art to the love of one's abusive parents. For the writer, it is inevitable to love one's parents, even if they were violent towards us; in the same way, it is unavoidable to love the great works of art made by people who have committed crimes.
What is monstrous about Dererer's book is what she wrote. "Monsters" are still icons because there are people like Dererer - with many means to get published
and sponsored - who believe they are artists themselves. That is, they are people with above-average sensitivity, so they can have the last word on what art must be for everybody. People who are willing to dehumanize all the rest of humanity, including victims, rather than remove the executioners from their pedestal because removing the executioners from the pedestal often also means eliminating others from the exact condition of privilege.
I proposed Rachel Cooke's review of Dererer's work as a breath of fresh air to a book that is a dangerous waste of paper and which offers a short-sighted and often vulgar vision of our relationship with art and with the lives of those who produce it; short-sighted and vulgar even by the standards of any provincial vernissage.