Can You Be an ‘Art Monster’ and a Good Person?
6 min read
When she coined the term art monster in 2014, Jenny Offill didn’t anticipate how fervently readers would take to it. In her novel Dept. of Speculation, Offill’s narrator—a writer, wife, and new mother—confesses in a now oft-quoted passage that when she was younger, “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.” She concedes that this idea was unorthodox: “Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.” The phrase, which Offill said she’d intended as something of a joke, gripped the imaginations of creative, middle-class women. “She used it as if we all already knew it and, given the response, I guess we did,” Lauren Elkin, who last year published a book called Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, said of Offill’s coinage. “But then, I was like, now Jenny has given it to us and it’s entered the feminist lexicon, how will we use it?”
It turns out loosely, and often. In a barrage of think pieces, women enchanted by the term wondered whether creative genius requires total domestic negligence—a willingness, as Claire Dederer, the author of the 2023 book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, put it, to “abandon the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.” This discourse wasn’t new. In 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin argued that women, saddled with “1,000 years of guilt, self-doubt, and objecthood,” had long been dissuaded from pursuing the arts, which were cast as a diversion fueled by “selfishness, egomania.” Decades later, some women saw Offill’s art monster as an invitation to deprogram, and they began to reclaim the self-involved artist “not as a villain, but as an aspiration,” as Willa Paskin wrote. Today, many observers remain stuck on the same question: Are women artists selfish enough?
Sabine, the protagonist of Ella Baxter’s bracing second novel, Woo Woo, certainly is. A conceptual artist living in Melbourne, Sabine is a textbook art monster who has, in her own words, “prostrated herself before the altar of art.” Her life, she says, revolves around the making and study of art; she claims to spend most of her time in her home studio, at galleries, and in the pages of art-history books, though she also devotes an awful lot of it to scrolling on TikTok. At 38, she’s found success (her CV boasts various grants and international exhibitions) and earned particular acclaim for her “gothic skins”—essentially, wearable life-size puppets that look like different versions of her and draw heavily from tropes of femininity (crone, siren, waitress, Venus). Sabine is ostensibly a feminist artist, but we never learn what moves her to make art in the first place; her work lacks a coherent politics. She describes one performance piece, in which she wears a gothic skin called Perimenopausal and sits in a self-dug hole next to a freeway, as having “something to do with the patriarchy, something to do with capitalism.”
Woo Woo takes place in the addled week leading up to Sabine’s “career-defining” solo exhibition, a series of self-portraits called Fuck You, Help Me. The bold title conceals artistic ambivalence: Sabine confesses to her gallerist that she is “a bit hazy on what ‘Fuck You, Help Me’ is technically about.” As the show nears, anxiety over its reception consumes her. Then things get weird: She begins receiving visits from the ghost of the experimental artist Carolee Schneemann and troubling correspondence from a potential stalker. Delusions of grandeur follow. She harasses a TikTok commenter who calls her work “Not good art,” watches porn in a McDonald’s, defecates in her backyard. At the behest of her gallery, she hosts TikTok livestreams to promote the exhibition, each video capturing her deterioration. Her husband, Constantine, remarks, “I swear the week you exhibit is like watching someone go through a prolonged psychosis.”
Sabine’s mental state is perhaps, in part, a response to the demands placed on contemporary artists. To find success in a crowded field with dwindling resources, Baxter’s novel suggests, being a creative genius is not enough. You must also be a jockeying careerist. Making art demands introspection; promoting it, though, requires performance, if not outright salesmanship. This conflict pervades Woo Woo. During a gallery-mandated livestream, Sabine declares that she is “wary of the pressure to market myself instead of my art,” yet she’s also keen on “differentiating herself” from the other artists her gallery represents. Later, ahead of an interview with a major art magazine, she calibrates her brand: Should she introduce herself as a “creative mongrel” or first acknowledge “the privilege of being a celebrated artist in this economy”? When the interviewer arrives, he lobs open-ended questions—“Where do your ideas come from?” “What about your drive to create?”—but demands “instant answers.”
Sabine’s response to these competing expectations is to turn self-promotion into an extension of her art. The first time we meet her, she’s directing Constantine as he takes photos of her to publicize the exhibition: “Pure, uncompromising rigour is needed to make transcendent, supernatural art,” she declares vaguely as she poses. She doesn’t even mind doing the livestreams, because, as she says, “recording anything with a camera made it into art.”
At its best, Woo Woo is a sharp, scathing satire of the monstrousness of the contemporary art world—namely, its competitiveness, pretensions, and suffocating insularity. Baxter has an acerbic pen, aided by an ear for dialect—she wields both internet- and therapy-speak, not to mention the willfully opaque language of the art world, to great effect in skewering her target. You needn’t be a selfish monster to make art, Baxter posits, but you may well become one in the process of promoting what you’ve made.
Woo Woo also wrings the glamour out of art monsterdom, complicating the feminist reclamation of this typically male cultural figure. Sabine is insufferable—a bad spouse and a bad friend, simultaneously needy and negligent. And despite her self-proclaimed devotion to her art, we never get the sense that her work is all that good. What’s more, Baxter casts her relationship with feminism as questionable at best through her interactions with her husband. Constantine is superhumanly supportive of Sabine (he is as steadfast as his name suggests), but Sabine resents his professional ambitions and co-opts the language of feminism to cast her personal grievance as a political concern: His career aspirations, she says, bear “all the hallmarks of the patriarchy.”
With her depiction of Sabine and Constantine’s marriage, Baxter doesn’t only push back on the claim (repeated by Offill’s narrator and a recent spate of books) that husbands are the enemies of women’s art. She questions just how empowering the art monster really is as a feminist symbol. A woman artist’s decision to be selfish in pursuit of her work might understandably seem subversive and empowering, not to mention a sign of seriousness and commitment to one’s craft. But a gender-flipped art monster isn’t really all that radical; as Mairead Small Staid has smartly argued, the feminist reclamation of art monsterdom “doesn’t upend the rules of a male-dominated canon but adheres to them” by perpetuating the dusty idea that artists should be held to different standards than other human beings. The novel’s marketing copy alleges that it is “about what it means to make art as a woman,” but Sabine’s egomania conforms to that of the archetypal male artist; at one point, Baxter writes that Sabine can’t “believe she was anything less than a young god,” which that most famous art monster, Pablo Picasso, often told himself too.
In the novel’s climax, Sabine attempts to make real her inner monstrousness. Using animal bones and raw parts from a butcher’s shop, she transforms herself into a giant pig and confronts her stalker. The moment stands out as the first time we see Sabine feel truly called to create—that is, to make art for a reason beyond professional ambition or personal vanity. We see her struck by vision, sourcing the materials, executing the performance. We see the process behind the product. Perhaps underneath the monster is an artist after all.
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