Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People? by Claire Dederer
| What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People? by Claire Dederer | |
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| Category: Politics and Society | |
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Reviewer: Heather Magee
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| Summary: An ambitious exploration into cancel culture. Among the endless cultural references and sharp theoretical turns, it's sink or swim as Dederer pulls us into the swampy debate of whether or not we can ever really separate the art from the artist. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 288 | Date: May 2024 |
| Publisher: Sceptre | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1399715072 | |
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Dederer sets out to unveil what she calls a biography of the audience in a deconstructed, thoroughly nitpicked, exploration of the old aphorism of separating the art from the artist in the context of contemporary cancel culture. Dederer's work is original and expressive. The reader gets the impression that the thoughts simply sprang and leapt from her brilliant mind and onto the page. In particular, the prologue packs a punch: she simultaneously condemns and exalts the director Roman Polanski, an artist she personally admires for his art, and yet despises for his actions. This model of monstrous men as she calls them, is consistent for the first few chapters, interrogating the likes of Woody Allen, Michael Jackson and Pablo Picasso. Her critical voice is acutely present throughout, never slipping into anonymity and maintaining her own subjectivity, as she holds it so dearly, and a personal, rather than collective voice.
The problems arise around chapter three, when Dederer begins to depart from the monstrous men line of argument (which was promised in the blurb) and begins to branch out into other forms of monsterhood, which did not do much to strengthen the debate; rather they confused it.
Unusual and interesting was the subversion of the original use of separating the art from the artist (i.e. what the public must do), and flipping it around to discuss the artist's perspective on the separation of their own life from their art. As original as it was, though, a section essentially about work-life balance in a book purportedly about reckoning with the dodgy biographies of beloved artists is arguably not what the reader signed up for. But Dederer tries to make this work with a clumsy bridge made from bricks claiming that motherhood can sometimes be monstrous when the mother-artist abandons her child to focus on her art (i.e. work-life balance). I think the reason this point felt so out of place is that the previous chapters had been about rapists and abusers, and this new focus was on absent mothers. It's not the same dilemma.
This being said, just as often as I frowned in disagreement at something that Dederer wote, I submitted to a nod of approval, impressed at her articulation of feelings that I had hitherto not seen expressed in written form, and her intelligent references to social theorists and philosophers (I found her discussions of late capitalism and consumerist societies through Debord to be pertinent).
This book would be so interesting to read as a fan. I envy the Swifties and ex-1-Directioners who can read Monsters and relate in some way to the lengthy sections on fan culture and parasocial relationships because they were so interesting, and I can see it being a real dilemma for a fan to have to come to terms with what their hero has done. However, I did feel somewhat alienated by Dederer's claims that fandom can and does equate to loving that person or thing in an unconditional way (or close to it). In fact, her argument is that love conquers all, even monstrous people who do monstrous things, if we truly love them, and that this love is insurmountable.
Well, what happens if I have actually never felt fandom to such a degree, and have never felt love or anything nearly close to it towards any celebrity famous enough to be cancelled or struck from the proverbial record? If I'm not alone, doesn't this just make Dederer's argument a bit weak? Speaking as a critic who feels, as Dederer encourages, I felt a bit left out of the conversation.
Overall, Dederer's prose is constantly questioning itself, the admission of fallibility very refreshing, considering that many critics, as she notes, often present their opinions as facts. Even her own feminism comes into question. She covers all bases, so that her own counter-argument forms before you can form one yourself. In fact, she's probably already thought about many of the critiques in this review. Sometimes her self-questioning takes the form of amusing parentheses, peppered about the prose, like edits that had been accidentally left in. This made for a very intimate reading experience with an author who you feel you get to know along the way.
For more non-fiction exploring the lives and biographies of artists, read The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe.
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