There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer. There is no authority and there should be no authority. … You will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end” (242). Dederer provides a fascinating new way of looking at how the work and lives of problematic artists are bound together. She poses so many topical questions, plays with so many pertinent ideas, that I'm still thinking about this book long after I finished.” Claire Dederer discusses in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma if we can separate art from artist/their biography?

We watch the glass fall to the floor; we don't get to decide whether the wine will spread across the carpet. Yeah, Vlad. Answers please. According to your biographer, you didn’t do anything nasty with little girls. We accept that. But you sure seem to have thought a lot about it. When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they're saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that's not how stains work.Face it. The heart wants what it wants. So, when Dederer includes personal history in the text, I realize why. Because it's personal. The people we love, the artists who speak to us from some higher point beyond moral authority and knowledge, move us, whether or not we can explain it, all out of love.

Here, Dederer writes the anti-cancel culture book. Allows us not to feel guilty about our pleasures and allows room for the gray space. Listening to this book, mostly the end but also at certain points throughout, was a less uncomfortable version of watching that scene in Tár where Cate Blanchett continuously bullies a non-binary Julliard student of color for deciding to opt out of performing and promoting the music of people who would've had no respect for them as brown person and for their non-patriarchal gender identity. They want their respect for the artist to be met with an artist's respect for their inherent humanity. Tár is threatened by this both because she gained and maintains her power in the industry through her complicity in upholding these oppressive power structures despite her oppression under these same structures and therefore does not meet this requirement and because she has deep emotional "art love" (Dederer's phrase) for these "important" "genius" composers. Like Tár, it does not feel like Dederer is interested in exploring what happens if we decide to open our heart to "art love" for people who are (to our knowledge) not exploiting the power they have been given in society. If we, like the Julliard student, want to opt out of this system how do we find the people to replace the monsters? How do we help them exist in a fundamentally exploitative system? Can funding art and creators through platforms like Patreon disrupt these exploitative systems or does it reproduce them differently? Are so many celebrities monstrous because monstrous people are drawn to power and acclaim or because the system that they are in encourages or even creates monstrous behavior? Dederer might not be interested in these questions but many people are interested in these questions and are evaluating them. This is where the discourse is going, not "is it ok to like David Bowie?" In her hands, vexed territory is oddly flattened out, its provocations mere mole hills on the way to nowhere. But in truth, I was more often baffled than bored. Virginia Woolf’s antisemitism (Dederer proudly tells a Jewish friend that she has “rumbled” this) hasn’t been forgotten; Allen Ginsberg isn’t better known than Philip Larkin (or not in Britain, anyway); JK Rowling doesn’t live in England. Monsters is populated with auteurs, with people whose instincts are singular and extreme, but its author’s real predilection seems to be for generalisation. An unwarranted detour into the world of scientists has her trotting out all the cliches about their eccentricity, the tattered garments and rope belts she believes they use to burnish their “genius”. Who can tell Picasso’s abused women apart? Not her, she tells us. They’re a “fleshy pig-pile” and she – well done, sister! – can never remember which is which. After discussing numerous monstrous examples this book comes to a chapter titled "Am I a Monster?" in which the author admits that her writing career on certain occasions hindered her role as a mother of two sons. In this chapter I didn't take such a confession too seriously because it sounded much the same as what any working mother might say. But then I as reader moved into later chapters where the author confesses to being an alcoholic for many years while her sons were growing up and that this hindered the quality of mothering.

I have no greater clarity on whether I think works of art should be cancelled or not if their creators are problematic, but my takeaway is … the uncertainty is kind of the point? It’s all about the journey?

This is where the sense of cynicism comes from. The system is corrupt and this thing that we think can do something actually won't do anything and instead of spending time evaluating alternative systems or looking at work people are doing to dismantle it or listening to the people who are actively being harmed, she says we should just stop worrying about it and just watch/read/listen to the things by bad people. Which makes sense if you think, like she states, that people are fundamentally interested in this for some sort of virtue signaling. What she fundamentally fails to grasp is that these strategies and conflicts exist because people want to do better, people want to fix injustice. It's not just about convincing yourself and others that you are not a monster but understanding the practical effects of what is happening to people and trying to create a better world. "Voting with your dollar" is the only avenue that some people have been exposed to to make a difference and if you truly feel like we should throw that strategy in the trash, the most practical thing you can do is expose readers to things they can do instead. And just like her I wandered through my thoughts and feelings, I agreed, disagreed, I pondered, wrote down so many quotes (SO MANY), shared them with my husband. I knew within the first chapter this would be a 5* and here we are. I find it difficult to sum up in brief what is so great here: you should just read it. But maybe it was simply so fantastic for me because this topic was on my mind so much. The internet can often make you feel alone and wrong when so many people loudly and self-assuredly throw out their voices about how we should cancel certain people. I felt small and maybe wrong when thinking that cancel culture is not the way, that people deserve redemption and I am not sitting on the high horse with a perfect moral compass to judge people. I truly believe we all are the sh*tty person at some point: we all have lied, looked away, have been ignorant, have had prejudices, have been wrong, etc. (and if you think you were not, you are lying, no discussion). Why should I call for judgement on other people? And why is it sometimes easier and sometimes harder to separate art and artist? Why do we sometimes love the art no matter what? This book dives into that, Dederer is just as lost and confused at times as me, she is trying to find a solution, an answer. The author uses the memoir format to trace her own experience feeling betrayed by artists. At one time she enjoyed Woody Allen’s movies, but was relieved to learn of a little free library filled with Woody Allen stuff so she had access to research materials for writing this book without needing to pay for them. Knyga ne tiems, kuriems nerūpi. Knyga tiems, kuriems skauda ir kurie klausia – o ką dabar su ta meile daryti? Ką daryti su meile kūriniui, jei kūrėjas – monstras? Autorė ramiai, empatiškai, išmintingai ir su humoru kalba apie genijus ir menininkus, labai žinomus ir menkiau aptartus, aptardama jų nuodėmes – nuo baisiausių iki tokių, kurias beveik galėtume pražiūrėti ir atleisti. Beveik. Kalba apie pateisinimus, kuriuos tokiems kūrėjams kuriame – ne dėl to, kad patys būtume prievartautojai, antisemitai, moteris mušantys alkoholikai, pedofilai ar žudikai, o todėl, kad menas – ne prekė, kuria vis dar prekiaujama rusijoje. Visokiems saldainiams ir tepamiems sūreliams pakaitalą rasti lengva. O vat kai kalba pasisuka apie kūrinius, kurie pakeitė gyvenimus, kito brand‘o jau nebepasirinksi. Galbūt noras mylėti, net kai problematiška, yra egoistiškas prieš aukas, tačiau labai žmogiškas. Ir man reikėjo šios knygos. Nes nepraeina diena, kai nepagalvoju – o ką man daryt su Rammsteinais? Jie gi šeši. Bet gi visi žinojo, jei vyko prievarta. Užsimerkė. Negirdėjo. Nusisuko. O ką daryti su kūryba, kuri ėjo mano gyvenime koja kojon pastaruosius 15 metų? For teenagers, music makes a kind of repository for feeling, a place for feelings to live, a carrier. So a betrayal by a musician becomes all the more painful – it‘s like being betrayed by your own inner self. In certain ways this is a book about broken hearts, and teenagers are the world‘s leading experts on heartbreak.“

Customer reviews

Dederer explores this. Comes to the idea of a stain. Does a single stain ruin a silk dress? So much so that the stain becomes the dress? Perhaps for some, but for others, it's just a stain. It'll wash out. It can be taken to the cleaners. It can be fixed. But the stain should not totally ruin the dress. The stain begins with an act, a moment in time, but then it travels from that moment, like a tea bag steeping in water, coloring the entire life." To get things going, Dederer offers up her own monstrousness. She is a mother who is also a writer, which means that she has been guilty of negligence on those occasions when she has accepted invitations for residential fellowships which have taken her away from home for weeks at a time. Worse still, she has hugged herself with relieved glee while doing it. On top of this, she spent 10 years as a functioning alcoholic, which is not something that usually combines well with engaged and committed family life. The tainting of the work is less a question of philosophical decision-making than it is a question of pragmatism, or plain reality. That's why the stain makes such a powerful metaphor: its suddenness, its permanence, and above all its inexorable realness. The stain is simply something that happens. The stain is not a choice. The stain is not a decision we make.