Can you separate the art from the artist?

On enjoying the work of problematic faves

“Art isn’t there to explain away complexities”

Deborah Levy

Literary critic Claire Dederer’s new book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma could not have arrived in my life at a more apt time. I had recently thrown away my vintage Michael Jackson t-shirt, was re-watching Californication (where Hank’s friends and family celebrate him escaping jail for statutory rape), had fallen down a rabbit hole about Albert Camus (whose womanising caused his wife to have a mental breakdown) and was busy scrolling through lists of all the offensive things Karl Lagerfeld ever said (he was “fed up” with MeToo, Adele was “a little fat”, same-sex adoption was wrong, etc) while watching the BBC’s new doc about him. And then! Dior renewed Johnny Depp’s contract for upwards of $20million, despite more than 100 French actors signing an open letter in protest against him walking the red carpet at Cannes. (And nope, no beauty conglomerates are hiring Amber Heard.)

The art, the artist and who is allowed to be monstrous is is not a new cultural conversation, although it has become much louder in the wake of MeToo and a cultural shift towards accountability (aka, ‘call out culture’). Dederer, whose book is expanded from a 2017 piece she wrote for The Paris Review about whether or not she could still enjoy the work of Woody Allen, traces it back to the New Critics of the early 20th century, who argued against “biological fallacy” in favour of art being divorced from its maker. Only the uncultured let their feelings about an artist get in the way of great art.

Dederer, for her part, argues that those “untroubled by [an artist’s] biography” are usually those best served by it: straight white (womanising) men, who make up 90% of the “art monsters”. Women can be art monsters too and the book includes some - but it’s typically for lesser misdeeds, such as leaving the family home and there are far less of them anyway, because female art hasn’t been elevated the same way as male art and its makers. Which makes this a book, predominantly, about men and the idea of ethical consumption - or more accurately, says Dederer, how something makes us feel.

Is it possible to enjoy a guilt-free reading of The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway, a violent alcoholic, of whom his own wife Martha Gellhorn said: “a man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome being”?

Can you watch Manhattan, featuring a 40-something man played by Woody Allen shagging a 17-year-old high-schooler, played by Mariel Hemingway, without thinking queasily of Allen’s own marriage to his step-daughter? “The heart wants what the heart wants” Allen said in 1992. (Hemingway later revealed that Allen tried to seduce her irl, too.)

Can you enjoy the art of Picasso, whilst ignoring that he tormented his family and described women as “machines for suffering”? “He submitted [women] to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them and crushed them onto his canvas…. once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them” wrote Marina Picasso in Picasso: My Grandfather.

And what kind of concessions should we make, asks Dederer: should Polanski be given a little leeway because of the immense amount of tragedy in his own life? (His mother died in Auschwitz; his wife and unborn child were shot dead by the Manson gang.) Does anti-semitism play a part, she wonders, in the rush to condemn both Allen and Polanski?

So many problematic faves, so little time! You’ll likely be running through that list with your own yes, no, yes, no. What you answer yes and no to is not the point. My yes could be your no, and vice versa. You’re trying to do an impossible “aesthetico-moral calculus” (as Dederer’s friend coins it) but without a calculator. (If only there was one!) Dederer argues that it’s difficult to enjoy art without acknowledging the moral ‘stain’. It seeps into the work. Whether or not it means you can’t enjoy the work is up to you, she says - but let’s not pretend biography doesn’t matter.

The idea that “biography not colour our experience” does not hold water, because we live in a parasocial time where we are obsessed with biography. (You only need look at Harry Styles’ and Justin Bieber’s stans and their trolling of the women associated with them). Biography matters because we live in an age of “obsessions”, says Dederer (guilty as charged), where we “act like our preferences matter” (this entire newsletter, lol.) We define ourselves by what we enjoy - and in tying our preferences to our own biography, we make it impossible to ignore the biography behind the art. What you enjoy, she says, it hardly impersonal. And so how can ‘we’ (where we, says Dederer, means ‘me’) demand the art to be?

Picasso with Marie-Thérèse Walter

The writer Doris Lessing, herself considered “an art monster” for leaving two of her children behind in Zimbabwe when she moved to the UK (with one child) wrote of Virginia Woolf (whose anti-semitism is often forgotten), “We all wish our idols and exemplars were perfect… but love has to be warts and all”. Does it? Or is that a little too simplistic?

It should be possible to hold two ideas in your head, at the same time. Karl Lagerfeld was a deeply cultured man, who owned over 300,000 books. He was also fatphobic. Karl Lagerfeld was incredibly generous and loyal to his friends. He was also homophobic. Karl Lagerfeld was an astoundingly talented designer, the most influential of his time. He was also an Islamaphobe. Does this mean you shouldn’t save up for a Chanel bag? Up to you! Does it mean Anna Wintour shouldn’t dedicate an entire Met Gala to him, without acknowledging a single shitty thing he said? Probably! There is no easy answer, and yet in our binary world (where social media encourages us only to revere, or cancel) we expect one. I’ve long advocated for sitting on the fence and never more so, with this subject.

Karl Lagerfeld, credit: Shutterstock

Monsters is not flawless. The chapter on Michael Jackson is flimsy and without fresh insight, while her chapter on Nabokov (and whether he was a monster for writing Lolita) goes on far too long. But Dederer is not afraid to get into the nitty gritty and to offer up her own monstrousness: she shares that she was an alcoholic for many years and at times, abandoned her own children to write. Most importantly, the book encourages us not to forget our complicity in the forging of the art monster and our romanticising of ‘the bad boy’:

“We want the asshole to cross the line, to break the rules… [We] see it as endemic to art-making itself. we reward and reward this bad behaviour until it becomes synonymous with greatness… It’s easy to think of the quality of genius as justifying bad behaviour, but maybe it works the other way round too. maybe we have created the idea of genius to serve our own attraction to badness”.

So where do you sit? I’d love to know your thoughts - especially if you’ve read Monsters.

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BITS

Journalism, pods and apparently now trees 🌲

• May’s Book Chat is out! (I forgot to flag in the last edish.) In this ep, Bobby and I discuss one lesser-known book (When I Hit You, by Meena Kandasamy) and one very, very well-known one (A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan). While I wonder why it took me so long to pick up Goon Squad (and dive headlong into the rest of Egan’s canon), Bobby has mixed feelings about When I Hit You - one of my favourite books of recent times, about a woman's marriage to an abusive communist professor in South India.

  

• I’ve joked about sending all the cancelled people to an island (how has no reality exec commissioned Cancelled Island yet???), but apparently it actually exists - albeit in club form. This piece in The New Yorker about a monthly meet-up for “fired university professors” and “controversial Tik Tokers” made me lol/ eye roll. Oh to be a fly on that wall.

• I was saddened to read of the death of Heather Armstrong, the ur “mommy blogger” behind Dooce. As a blogger myself in the late noughties/ early 2010s, I read her religiously. This piece by Taylor Lorenz for The Washington Post elegantly describes how Armstrong transformed women’s media and set a new precedent for confessional writing online about motherhood.

• My friend Otegha sent me this Esquire piece by Alicia Oltuski which starts as a review of Romantic Fiction by Curtis Sittenfeld (which I loved) and opens up into a rigorous excavation of the ‘literary’ vs. ‘commercial’ binary in fiction. Female authors like Meg Wolitzer have long argued that when women write about the domestic it’s considered commercial (with connotations of lower quality) but when men - Knausgaard, Eugenides, Franzen - do, it’s literary (the ‘real’ art). My god, let’s find some new terms.

• I am gobbling The Traitors during night feeds (as guilt-free delish as everyone says). Fave line thus far is septuagenarian Andrea remarking mildly, “I don’t want to go home, but I’m not going to shit a brick over it” before breaking down into tears squeaking “I’m doing my best!” mere episodes later.

  

  Lucky Claudia Winklevii

• This interview with Elise Hu in Culture Study about her new book, Flawless - a study of K-Beauty’s improbable beauty ideals and its political/ economic origins - is fascinating. Korea has more plastic surgeons per capita than any other country (by far) and cosmetic surgery tourism is so common, you can actually get a certificate to take back through border control to explain why your face no longer looks like the face in your passport. YEESH. Related recc: Frances Cha’s bonkers novel, If I Had Your Face.

• I lost my Call Your Daddy virginity this week in order to listen to Gwyneth Paltrow talk about who is the better ride: Brad Pitt, or Ben Affleck. (“It’s a stacked roster” notes host Alexandra Cooper.) I could scarcely hit play quicker. Brad was “major chemistry love of [her] life”, but Ben was “technically excellent”. “God bless J-Lo, and everything she’s getting over there” responds Cooper.

  

• I wish Reconstruction was around when my sister had cancer five years ago. It’s a practical, warm and honest handbook by Rosamund Dean for anyone navigating and recovering from breast cancer (here’s an extract) and a really useful gift for anyone you know battling that bastard disease.

• I find e-mail etiquette exhausting - the circling back and the bumping up and the touching of bases. (I am blessedly ignoring my inboxes whilst on mat leave). And so I nodded along vigorously to everything psychologist Adam Grant says in this piece for The NYT and this one for Inc. His faux pas include introducing someone without seeking permission from the recipient, chasing for a response (when the person never agreed to receiving correspondence in the first place) and apologising for your delayed response when you’ve replied promptly. Could Adam Grant pls write an e-mail handbook that every human is gifted on their 13th birthday? We need rules!

• Ending on this wk’s micro-obsession: Hyperion, the world’s tallest tree. The redwood is estimated to be 700-800 years old, measuring almost 116 metres. I do wonder if he ever gets lonely up there, but think of the things he’s seen!