Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

Even so, it was the same old town where I’d grown up, a town where boys did things and girls watched. I dimly intuited that my authority was undermined by my very girl-ness.

As early as 1819, the Italian poet Alessandro Manzoni was neatly articulating the problem of the reviewer, in his preface to his tragedy in verse The Count of Carmagnola: “Every work of art provides its reader with all the necessary elements with which to judge it. In my view, these elements are: the author’s intent; whether this intent was reasonable; whether the author has achieved his intent.”

I didn’t know it when I was a young critic, but I now know this: my subjectivity is the crucial component of my experience as a critic, and the very best thing I can do is simply acknowledge that fact. It was a hard thing to learn, as a young female surrounded by men who saw their role differently. Indeed, they never had to question their subjectivity, because of course it was perceived as the universal, default point of view, and often as not the same point of view as that of the artist himself. Hence they were able to make pronouncements that, when examined closely, have the whiff of insanity about them. “Definitive,” “finest,” “best of the decade”—it’s bananas to make such statements.

The work is transmitted from one type of artist (that is, male) to the same type of viewer (also male). The artist has an ideal audience; the audience has an ideal artist; the rest of us are outside of that dyad. Not excluded; but not of the dynamic.

The old-fashioned critic, like the Pythons, can’t see that he’s part of a group, because he’s never been left out. He feels unbounded by his own biases; the critic doesn’t even understand he has biases.

Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.

The image of artistic genius is above all free. Picasso’s work satisfyingly reflects the kineticism of the man who made it. A viewer gets a buzz just looking at it. The work is unnerving, or rather extra-nerving: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with its hot pink bodies and its grimly animal faces and its hostile-feeling distortions, makes us jumpy and energized; we mimic, internally, the state of the artist. Picasso’s friend the poet André Salmon wrote that Les Demoiselles “unleashed universal anger” when it was first unveiled, and I have to admit I still feel a little pissy when I look at it. A kind of jumped-up feeling.