Claire Dederer. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. New York: Vintage, 2023
Claire Dederer. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. New York: Vintage, 2023

Summary/Abstract: The “monster” of Claire Dederer’s title is “someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms” (43). Her monsters are famous artists, mostly (though not exclusively) men, whose biographies have become impediments to a comfortable appreciation of their art. The question Dederer poses is: what do we do with the art of monstrous men? Can we go on, she asks, loving the films of Roman Polanski or Woody Allen, the music of Michael Jackson or Miles Davis, the fiction of Ernest Hemingway, the paintings of Pablo Picasso, now that we know about their private lives? Know, that is, that they abused and exploited women, raped girls, raped boys? After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

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