This is Leslie VonHolten of Kansas with another Radio Readers Book Byte.
“What do we do with the art of monstrous men?” Author Claire Dederer made waves with her essay asking that question in the Paris Review in 2017. It has been a perennial problem in modern and contemporary art and has been especially uncomfortable since the #MeToo movement. There were days when I worried that every artist (okay, male artist) I admired was deeply, horribly, monstrously awful. What was my duty in this, culturally?
I love art, I love music, literature, film. My love of art defines me in many ways. It’s what I love to talk about, it’s how I connect with community. I studied art history in college and never regretted my degree, even when it has never given me a lucrative career. Yet so much of my studies were full of “genius” (quote-unquote) artists trailing victims—often women and children—behind them. And here I was, another adoring fan, ignoring the pain they caused. Examples: Picasso extinguished a cigarette on Francoise Gilot’s face, to punish her. Hemingway, a class-A misogynist. Miles Davis, domestic abuse. Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson. Roman Polanski has been on the lam since 1978. And good heavens, Richard Wagner’s gut-curdling antisemitism. I can’t even.
But all of these men—their art changed lives. Those of us who love art argue that they changed the world. So, we rely on the adage, “You have to separate the art from the artist.” But I always feared—was I just being lazy?
This is why I devoured Dederer’s book when it came out this past April. Titled Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, she refrains from prescriptive advice—the question to Dederer is not whether or not to cancel these monster-artists or bury their legacies. It is much more complicated than that. And it’s those complications that she explores.
Monsters gives us more questions than answers, but it is the best critique of fandom I have read. Among the questions Dederer poses: Why is it up to the fan to reconcile what to do with these great artists? Where were the courts, the museum directors, the critics, the gatekeepers when they were committing their crimes?
Another question: If we watched a film in our early 20s and it shifted the way we see the world, changed our career path or introduced us to new people, can we just turn off that love for the film? Since when is love a spigot that can be controlled? And can’t I be disgusted by Woody Allen but still love Annie Hall?
Dederer is not giving these artists a pass, though. To me, she is expanding the idea and role of the audience, the idea and role of me as an art consumer. It is not as if culture is like buying a T-shirt, or one brand of olives over another. As time has moved on, I have become a more measured participant in the arts. Our society has changed, has made me more aware that talent on the canvas is not a pass for reprehensible behavior. But I am also older. I still love art, but it’s rare for it to rock my world, to alter my DNA like it could when I was in my 20s. I think that is part of the trajectory of art loving as well.
This is Radio Reader Leslie VonHolten recommending Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. You can find more summer reading recommendations at HPPR.org, or Like us on Facebook.
