By Melissa Rodman
The art monster is messy, ambitious, and narcissistic but couldn’t care less about what you think. Are you frightened?
Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York by Marin Kosut. Columbia University Press, 272 pages
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 368 pages
What do you think of when you hear the word “monster”? Perhaps Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein comes to mind, the “creature” cobbled together and supernaturally brought to life. Perhaps the word evokes a childhood fear, a darkened room where something lurks beneath your bed. Perhaps, using our post-#MeToo lexicon, you’re debriefing with a friend after a horrifying date. “Watch out for him,” she might say. “He’s a monster.”
Three books published in the last two years focus on a specific yet elusive kind of monster, the “art monster,” a term coined by Jenny Offill in her 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation. “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead,” Offill writes. “Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.” Offill suggests that the “art monster” is someone out of the ordinary, selfish, art-obsessed, and most likely a man. The art monster is messy, ambitious, and narcissistic but couldn’t care less about what you think. Are you frightened?
The three books — Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (2023) by Claire Dederer, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023) by Lauren Elkin, and now Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York (2024) by Marin Kosut — all quote those same lines from Offill’s novel. The idea of creating or in some cases immersing yourself in art at the expense of relationships, stability, being nice, polite, demure, or presentable captivates these authors. Monsters, Art Monsters, and Art Monster all are about the obsession with that inexplicable, personal frisson that comes, sometimes, when you are drawn to a piece of art and it becomes your whole world. These books are hybrid works that stitch together snippets of personal essay, cultural criticism, and sociology, meditating on various aspects of the “art monster.”
Neat conclusions aren’t what you’ll find in any of these books. Instead, the interlaced notion of monster, art, and women preoccupies these authors, who approach their different but related projects in discursive, contradictory, throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall ways. For Dederer, the driving question is whether we can love art created by monstrous people like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Pablo Picasso, and more. Elkin considers how women artists like Carolee Schneemann, Eva Hesse, Kara Walker, and Vanessa Bell have used their work, bodies, and politics to reject traditional scripts, to transform themselves into art monsters instead. And Kosut grapples with what life is like for unsung, unknown art monsters (i.e., people who have devoted their lives to artmaking, often at great personal/financial/professional cost) in New York City. The postscript in Kosut’s book, furthermore, acknowledges that she “wasn’t the only author drawn to Offill’s art monster” and points to Dederer’s and Elkin’s books specifically.
Experiencing a work of art can stir up overwhelming feelings, and these books paddle in the messy surge. The epigraph of Dederer’s book, a quotation from writer Shirley Hazzard, suggests that art itself has supreme, monstrous power, that we yield to it even when we think we have control: “It is always tempting, of course, to impose one’s view rather than to undergo the submission required by art—a submission, akin to that of generosity or love.” Dederer’s chapters probe how this submission to or love for a work of art can thrive even if the movie, painting, or novel in question was created by an artist who has committed rape, is misogynistic, anti-semitic, or transphobic, or behaves in other horrifying ways. “The question ‘what do we do with the art?’ is a kind of laboratory or a kind of practice for the real deal, the real question: what is it to love someone awful?” she writes. “It’s the problem and it’s the solution, this durable nature of love.”
Early on in Art Monster, Kosut also focuses on how we often have no choice but to submit to art. She cites American art critic Irving Sandler, who in 1952 encountered the painting Chief (1950) by Franz Klein in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Unfortunately, Kosut doesn’t really describe the painting, which is a work of thick black lines and black patches of varying opacity, with patches of white space breaking through. This work absolutely mesmerized Sandler. “[I]t was like releasing the floodgates of seeing,” he wrote. “I looked to art for meaning, for the illumination of my life — and by extension, of my society. Art became the content of my life, to paraphrase [Russian artist Kazimir] Malevich, and even a kind of surrogate religion.”
This idea — art as both substance and sustenance of one’s life — resonates with the struggling artists whom Kosut looks at in Art Monster, including herself. Predictably, some, including Kosut, find themselves questioning whether the determination to make art in New York, without achieving success in critical or financial terms, is worth the struggle. “You can’t believe you’re forty…. You don’t have gallery representation, and you’re subletting a windowless studio in Bushwick with two other artists in their late twenties,” Kosut writes. “Multiple paychecks almost cover it, credit cards maxed.”
This whining tone, which runs through the book, may repel some readers. Kosut’s attitude is — who cares? Baring her teeth as an art monster, on the page she snaps at her readers and even at a peer reviewer. “A scholar who anonymously reviewed this manuscript wrote that I ‘portrayed a romanticized starving artist with working-class roots rejecting capitalism, on the one hand, and vapid rich philistines destroying the city, on the other. It’s tempting to skewer the rich, but it’s not novel,’” she summarizes with derision. Then, she retaliates: “I’m not trying to be novel. I’m trying to be honest, and I am fucking furious.”
Somewhat like Kosut’s unsung artists, Elkin’s subjects make art “against received ideas, to signify outside the usual path.” She goes into dizzying detail about the works examined in the volume’s survey of feminist art history, evaluating context, content, composition, and iconography as well as her own experiences with the art works. Describing Cindy Sherman’s photograph Untitled #175 (1987), for example, Elkin writes, “Half-eaten brownies and Pop-Tarts are strewn in the sand alongside some unidentifiable green substance that resembles Silly String but which is probably some kind of icing; the towel itself is covered with vomit… ‘ugh!’ I said loudly when I first saw it in vivid, chromogenic colour.” This photograph, and the other art Elkin covers, is graphic, unexpected, challenging, and kind of gross. ”
[T]he culture punishes women for being something other than small and silent,” Elkin argues. “Our boundaries have been policed; when we have overspilled them we have been called disgusting… the art monster idea is a dare to overwhelm the limits assigned to us, and to invent our own definitions of beauty.”
Being subversive, being monstrous, is the point. Bitching and moaning about the status quo, about the reality of patriarchy, about very real challenges, frustrations, and disappointments, however, not only grows tiresome but also is counterproductive to the ultimate goal of an art monster: creating exceptional art. Instead of navel-gazing, why not convert all that pain and rage into action?
Melissa Rodman is a journalist and critic based in New York.
