44 pages • 1 hour read
Claire DedererMonsters: A Fan's Dilemma
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Objectivity Versus Subjectivity in Art Consumption
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussions of rape, sexual assault, pedophilia, and domestic violence.
In art analysis and criticism, objectivity is frequently touted as the ideal mode of consuming artwork. Dederer examines this ideal throughout the book, challenging the premise that objective consumption is possible, and highlighting how the ideal has been weaponized against female consumers of art. She introduces the tension between an ideal objective viewer, and the more realistic subjective viewer in Chapter 2, “Roll Call,” describing the pushback she encounters against her viewing of Woody Allen’s Manhattan from multiple male acquaintances. Relating a conversation about the film she had with a colleague, Dederer writes:
‘I think [Manhattan’s] creepy on its own merits, even without knowing about Soon-Yi.’
‘Get over it. You really need to judge it strictly on aesthetics.’
‘So what makes it objectively aesthetically good?’
Male writer said something smart-sounding about ‘balance and elegance’ (40).
The dismissive attitude of Dederer’s male colleague, in combination with his self-assured claims to an objective, “aesthetic” reading of Manhattan points to a dynamic of male hegemony in the art world that conflates the masculine perspective with objective truth.
Later, Dederer points to this male-centric mode of analyzing art as being equally subjective as female-coded modes of analysis. She argues that a man (especially a white man) is conditioned to see his perspectives as objective because “he’s never been left out. He feels unbounded by his own biases; the critic doesn’t even understand he has biases” (75). In Dederer’s eyes, the men who claim to be capable of perfect objectivity when consuming art only do so out of naivete. Unlike marginalized groups who are constantly reminded of their otherness by societal structures, white men are essentially blinded by their hegemony and therefore view their perspectives as universal.
Although Dederer rejects the ideal of objectivity as a myth within this scheme, she also argues that the ideal exists, as evidenced by her inability to live up to it. Recalling the early years of her criticism career, she writes, “Me, I wasn’t able to muster such surety. I thought this was because I simply was doing it wrong. I felt stuck in my own subjectivity, unable to ascend to empyrean heights of critical authority” (71). Dederer contrasts her male colleagues’ blissful ignorance of their subjectivity with her painful awareness of her own. The ideal of objective art consumption, she argues, undermines her status as an art consumer, not just in the eyes of others, but in her own self-image.
Biography as “Stain”
Throughout Monsters, Dederer explores the relationship between an artist’s life and their work, and the ways audiences of art interpret that relationship. In Chapter 2, she introduces the concept of “the stain,” a central metaphor in the book for how unsavory moments in an artist’s biography can permanently color the reception of their work once revealed to the public. “When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist,” she writes, “they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work” (48). Dederer highlights the inconvenient permanence of biography by positing that what happens in an artist’s life cannot be erased, just as a persistent grease stain cannot be removed from fabric, no matter how much the audience might wish it. Dederer centers a comparison between the pre- and post-digital eras to argue that the latter fosters a heightened sense of intimacy between audiences and the creatives they admire—increasing the impact and indelibility of the stain.
Dederer pushes this comparison further to argue that the function of the stain has evolved over time. Whereas in the current, digital, moment, the stain is an inescapable source of hurt, in the 20th century, it could be an accepted, inherent part of a male artist’s image, inextricably linked to their genius: “This person might be stained—in fact almost always is stained—but the stain seems not to dent his importance. His primacy” (84). Not only does the stain “not dent” a genius’s reputation, but it is actually an alluring aspect of their reputation. This particular version of artistic greatness, deeply rooted in ideals of masculine violence, was forged by artists of the early 20th century and became ubiquitous in popular culture. Dederer focuses on Hemmingway and Picasso to unpack how this idea of the monstrous genius finds its analog in the contemporary male rock star. She writes, “Hemingway’s and Picasso’s true descendants were the determinedly demonic men of rock. Rock stars enacted an escalating ideal of freedom, from Elvis gyrating his hips to Jim Morrison pulling his dick out onstage” (108). This masculine “freedom” without accountability is the exact notion of freedom that 21st-century consumers of culture have attempted to combat with efforts like the #MeToo Movement.
In her exploration of the stain, Dederer works to reveal an ideological conflict between centuries. What art consumers perceive as a stain in the 21st century, 20th-century consumers accepted—even demanded—from male artists. Monsters thus presents a detailed account of how ideological shifts on a societal scale can revolutionize the way that people understand art. According to Dederer, the retrospective gaze of contemporary viewers reveals stains on the works of artists from prior centuries.
Misogynistic Structures in the Art World
Monsters is, at its core, a work of feminist criticism. Dederer makes her intention to write the book from a feminist perspective explicit, telling readers in the Prologue, “I wanted to be a virtuous consumer, a demonstrably good feminist, but at the same time I also wanted to be a citizen of the world of art, a person who was the opposite of a philistine” (10). The dilemma she presents here pits the art world against her feminism, indicating that the two are diametrically opposed in a fundamental way. Indeed, the book posits that the world of art, as it exists today, is built upon an infrastructure of misogyny, reinforced by centuries of gendered oppression.
As a scholar and critic of art, Dederer encounters small-scale misogyny in her daily work. She describes the male colleagues and readers who tell her to “get over” her discomfort with Woody Allen’s depictions of women as entirely uninterested in her female perspective, and indeed, demeaning of it. In the early stages of her career as a film critic, she found herself “[s]urrounded by male critics, watching mostly films made by men, [her] brain stuffed with auteur theory (not actually a theory)” (69). She reflects, “I felt my job was in service to the great man” (69). In Monsters, she extrapolates this individual experience of a job environment organized around male perspectives to larger systems of misogynistic thought in the art world.
The misogynistic systems that Dederer points to are both ideological and practical ones, positioning auteur theory as a key example of the former. She parallels auteur theory with the idea of artistic genius, arguing that both are reserved for a sort of “he-man” archetype, inaccessible to female filmmakers and consumers. In the later chapters of the book, Dederer delves into the ways that the demands of artmaking compete with other demands placed on women, namely motherhood, through the lens of her personal experience. “I was stuck being a mother, which I loved more than anything I will do in this life,” she writes, “The problem was the orthogonal thing—being a mother and being an artist. How to make them work in tandem?” (188-89). The immersion in art expected of great artists runs parallel to the immersion in parenting expected of mothers, making it nearly impossible for women to do both. This dilemma torments Dederer, who finds herself envying the female “monsters” she criticizes for their ability to bypass the misogynistic bind.
