Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
Ratings21
Average rating3.9
15
Ratings21
Average rating3.9
From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, a passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.
Reviews with the most likes.
Dederer doesn't aim to tell you what you should do with the work of terrible people. What she offers is a refreshingly honest meditation on the topic so if you were afraid of this one being a defense of “cancel culture” fear not this isn't what you'll find.
I don't think I'm any closer to a less amorphous take on the subject than I was before but I feel validated in some regards so there's that.
This book taught me what loving a thing is. It doesn't answer what you should do with an issue about art vs artist but it certainly helps you navigate those murky waters.
DNF 50%
This book is not really enlightening, its just exhausting. I've seen a lot of people say this book made them think about a lot of things but I guess I have already thought about those things because nothing in this book so far felt to me like worthwhile of being a book and not an essay, and I furthermore don't know why this author should be the one I'm listening to. It's mostly just, “oh yeah, a lot of people loved Harry Potter/David Bowie/Bill Cosby, and they shouldn't have to feel bad for that, but sometimes they do anyways” over and over again.
I so thoroughly enjoyed this book, and in large part of what Dederer doesn't do: she's not preachy, she's not minimizing of the severity of her task (making sense of the art of “monsters”). Rather, she takes seriously both the work of some many great and their crimes, moral if not also legal. She does this while taking you along for the ride and forcing (helping?) you interrogate how you square what you love with what you believe, as she does so well in this passage:
“[W]ho is this ‘we' that's always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking the mantle of easy authority. It's the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist. Can you? When I say ‘we', I mean I. I mean you“
