Monsters
Claire Dederer
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From the publisher
A brilliantly buzzy consideration of how we - the fans - should respond to good art made by bad people
Wise and bold and full of the kind of gravitas that might even rub off' LISA TADDEO
'An exhilarating, shape-shifting exploration of the perilous boundaries between art and life' JENNY OFFILL
Pablo Picasso beat his partners. Richard Wagner was deeply antisemitic. David Bowie slept with an underage fan. But many of us still love Guernica and the Ring cycle and Ziggy Stardust.
And what are we to do with that love? How are we, as fans, to reckon with the biographical choices of the artists whose work sustains us?
Wildly smart and insightful, Monsters is an exhilarating attempt to understand our relationship with art and the artist in the twenty-first century.
What do we do with the art of monstrous men? Can we love the work of Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, Hemingway and Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? What makes women artists monstrous? And what should we do with beauty, and with our unruly feelings about it?
Claire Dederer explores these questions and our relationships with the artists whose behaviour disrupts our ability to understand the work on its own terms. She interrogates her own responses and behaviour, and she pushes the fan, and the reader, to do the same. Morally wise, deeply considered and sharply written, Monsters gets to the heart of one of our most pressing conversations.
'A blisteringly erudite and entertaining read . . . It's a book that deserves to be widely read and will provoke many conversations' NATHAN FILER
'Fascinating . . . Dederer poses so many topical questions, plays with so many pertinent ideas, that I'm still thinking about this book long after I finished it' CLAIRE FULLER
'An incredible book, the best work of criticism I have read in a very long time' NICK HORNBY
'Part memoir, part treatise, and all treat' New York Times
'How rare and nourishing this sort of roaming thought is and what a joy to read' MEGAN NOLAN, Sunday Times