When the art you love was created by ‘monsters’: a critic exposes the ‘fan’s dilemma’

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Last month, I gave a talk at a conference honoring the late writer Norman Mailer. When I mentioned this lecture in class to my students in Georgetown, a few of them blurted out, “But, he stabbed his wife. I could feel the atmosphere in this classroom change: the students seemed perplexed, even disappointed. What was I doing speaking at a conference honoring a man capable of such an act?

The situation was reversed at the conference itself: when I confessed in my speech that, although I revere Mailer’s non-fiction writings, I was just as glad I had never met him, some members of the public were surprised, offended on Mailer’s behalf.

If Mailer’s writing had always been as bad as his sporadic behavior, there would be no problem. But as Claire Dederer points out in her superb new book, Monsters, the problem arises when great art is done by men who have done bad things: men like Picasso, Hemingway, Roman Polanski, Miles Davis, Woody Allen and , yes, Mailer .

Are we putting on blinders and just focusing on work? Do geniuses, as Dederer asks, get a “free pass” for their behavior? Or are we “cancelling” the art of men and certain women who have done “monstrous” things?

I hope Dederer herself doesn’t turn out to be a freak because I totally admire her book and want to share it with my students. As a thinker, Dederer is smart, informed, nuanced and very funny. She started as a film critic and considers Pauline Kael as a model to base her judgments on her own subjectivity, her own emotions.

The subtitle of Monsters is A Fan’s Dilemma: the dilemma always being to like, say, the music of Wagner or Michael Jackson; always caught in movies like Chinatown or maybe even Manhattan. In short, Dederer wants to dive deep into the darkness of being “unwilling to give up work [of art you love]And [yet, also being] don’t want to look away from the stain [of the monster who created it].”

The #MeToo movement propels this exploration, but also our own social media, a time saturated with biographies: “When I was young,” Dederer writes, “it was hard to find information about the artists whose work I liked. Save albums and books appeared before us as if they had arrived after crossing the black expanses of space, detached from any context.”

These days, however, “[w]We turn against Seinfeld, and whether we like it or not, we think of Michael Richard’s racist rant. … The biography was something you sought, aspired to, actively pursued. Now it’s been on your head all day.”

Perhaps you can hear in these quotes how alive Dederer’s critical language is. She also frequently opens the door to the stuffy seminar room, so to speak, to take her readers on an excursion: There’s a fancy dinner party in New York with an intimidating “man of letters” who, she says, likes to play party, “ironically but not the ties and the blazers and the low-key misogyny and the brown booze in a tumbler.”

When she expresses distaste for Allen’s Manhattan normalizing a middle-aged man in a relationship with a 17-year-old, he tells her to “Get over it. You really have to judge it strictly on aesthetics. ” Dederer admits to having found herself unbalanced in this conversation, doubting herself.

We also browse an exhibition of Picasso at the Vancouver Art Gallery in the company of Dederer and his children. At the time, she says, they “possessed the fierce morality one finds in teenagers and maniacs, [and] were starting to look a little annoyed” by the exhibition’s revelations of Picasso’s abusive treatment of the women in his life.

So where does all this walking, talking, thinking, and reacting lead us on the issues of monsters and their art? Still in the dark, perhaps, but perhaps a little bolstered by a pointed question that Dederer throws out in the middle of his book:

What if criticism involved trusting our feelings not just about the crime, which we mourn, but about the work we love.

To do this we will have to think and feel with much more urgency and yet more care than we do now. As Dederer and Pauline Kael suggest, we should go ahead and lose it in the movies, and then think seriously about what we’ve lost.

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