The Art Monster Under The Bed

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Art-making is not the kind of work that is easily confined between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. An artist needs ample time to spend putting pen to paper, or brush to canvas; they also require unbounded hours or days to let their mind wander in search of inspiration. As Hillary Kelly has written for this magazine, “the dream state, the musing, the meditation” is what “makes space for ideas.”

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

• What Nikki Giovanni wouldn’t write about
• “Fossil Record for My Grandmother,” a poem by Dara Yen Elerath
• Oliver Sacks’s lifelong search for recognition

The demands of the creative life can sometimes be at odds with the task of nurturing human relationships. This week, we published Sophia Stewart’s review of Woo Woo, Ella Baxter’s second novel. Its main character, Sabine, is a relatively successful mid-career artist who’s gearing up for an important solo exhibition. But she is also a bit of what some writers have come to call an “art monster.” Jenny Offill coined the term in her 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation, to refer to a person who neglects domestic convention in order to devote all their energies toward creativity, and Sabine fits the bill: She’s “a bad spouse and a bad friend, simultaneously needy and negligent,” Stewart writes. Sabine seems akin to the ranks of women who read Offill’s book and imagined the self-involved artist “not as a villain, but as an aspiration,” as Willa Paskin wrote in 2018.

Some creative geniuses make the world richer because of their work. Others have used their cultural impact as an excuse not to treat others with basic respect. The latter group brings to mind a truly notorious kind of “art monster”—an artist who is not just neglectful but abusive or even criminal. This figure prompts a moral question: “What ought we to do about great art made by bad men?” as Claire Dederer asked in her 2023 book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. In other words, how do we give a monster’s work its due without rewarding its creator? One answer is to separate the artistic merit of a film, opera, or book entirely from the conduct of its inventor, arguing that some things are too precious, too canonical, to lose.

Even if that logic holds true, what about art monsters who make work that’s simply not very good? This is the wry joke of Baxter’s novel: As it turns out, Sabine doesn’t have much of an aesthetic vision—what is there is driven mostly by vanity. She’s a solipsistic careerist and, even worse, a second-rate one. Sabine doesn’t rise to the level of many of the people Dederer studies in her book; she’s selfish, but probably not abusive. Either way, sacrificing her output doesn’t seem to constitute too big of a loss. Mediocrity, the story reminds us, is far more common than genius—and so is bad behavior.

A Biting Satire of the Art World’s Monstrousness

By Sophia Stewart

Ella Baxter’s new novel explores why creative genius so often seems to be at odds with being a good person.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Natural Beauty, by Ling Ling Huang

Huang’s debut novel is set in the wellness industry, fertile ground for bodily unease. The narrator, a young classical musician, abandons a promising future as a concert pianist to support her parents after an accident. She takes a job at a high-end beauty shop, Holistik, which carries products that are unnaturally effective. As the narrator gets more involved with the family who founded the company, she discovers quintessential hints that something is amiss: evidence of animal experimentation in the laboratory and dramatic physical transformations among the clientele. Still, her financial dependence on the job—and her growing entanglement with the founders—makes it difficult for her to walk away. When the force behind this company’s ethos and practices is finally revealed, it feels at once shocking and foretold from the start.  — Tajja Isen

From our list: Read these six books—just trust us

Your Weekend Read

The Luxury Makeover of the Worst Pastry on Earth

By Ellen Cushing

Certain fetish foods have a life cycle: They are hated, and then they are elevated by well-meaning obsessives via the use of premium ingredients and better production techniques, and then liking these foods becomes a symbol of taste and sophistication, of being in on something. “Getting it,” in the figurative sense, becomes as much a prize as having it, in the material sense. “You see the unboxing videos, and it starts this spiral effect of: I need to try this, I need to understand what’s going on here,” the food influencer Katie Zukhovich told me. “I don’t think people can imagine that panettone is so good because it’s always been so fine.”

Read the full article.

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