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amyellen18 's review for:

Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People? by Claire Dederer
3.75
adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad fast-paced
I was going to rate this book 3.25 stars, but the last two chapters brought up my rating by half a star. They, for me, were the most memorable part of the book and contain a lot of the key things I will take away from my reading experience of this book. However, the only way these chapters can come is to understand everything from those previous. Additionally, the previous chapters gain another layer of value when looked back on with the lens of having read the whole book.

I've had my eye on this book for a while, and I have to admit I was slightly nervous to actually pick it up, worried what I would find inside, and I think that is exactly the reason why I did pick it up. It is a book on monsters who've made art, and that is to say, a large chunk of the people who've made art. The book discuses many specific cases, but also takes a holistic view of the larger situation, recognising that both the finer details and bigger pictures are important. There are a few people in this book that I do not know of, which is probably due to the fact I was born in 2005, but despite not being aware of some specific artists and their art, I was still interested to read about what they had done and what they had made and what the author had to say about them - I obviously still felt the anger towards these peoples' crimes, but I had not interacted with their art and did not have an existing feeling towards their art prior to learning of their crimes, and therefore my feelings will differ from those who did. However, I was - sadly - able to relate a lot of the circumstances to artists that I have been aware of.

This leads to a point which, for me, is one of the most memorable from the book. I will enclose it in spoiler tags, although I'm not sure it really classes as a spoiler, but just in case.
Throughout a lot of this book, the idea of objectivity vs subjectivity is discussed. In academic circles (beginning in school), objectivity is valued as the gold standard for reviewing etc, which is slightly insane for multiple reasons, which are discussed in this book. To begin, no one experiences the world through an objective lens. That just isn't possible, as real people experience real things through their own lens and their own experiences, and their emotions and feelings play an enormous part in how they take in anything, most notably for this book, how they take in art. Secondly, Dederer points out that too often 'objectivity' and 'subjective perspective of middle-class straight white men' are conflated, and the perspective of anyone else or any other group of people is dismissed as 'subjective' and 'just based on feeling', which could both be applied to the supposedly 'objective' perspective, as as Dederer says, isn't feeling what almost everything is based on? This idea is something I have always thought about, having been a neurodivergent, queer (and white, and having been afforded the privilege that comes with that) girl and now woman in a world very much built for straight white neurotypical men, something which they do not even realise. This book told of conversations and ideas which echoed a situation from a couple of years ago, where I had been trying to talk to a male relative about how the world is built for men, and almost before listening to a word I had to say, he said 'Who said the world is built for men?' and started to talk about sources, when the fact that it is has always been plain to see for every woman. Overall, Dederer's point that subjectivity is important as it is far more real than objectivity, affirmed what I've felt for a long time but struggled to put into words.


The book also discusses who is afforded this chance to be both a monster and a revered artist, and how these people are always men. Men who've been afforded the status of 'genius' are allowed to commit heinous crimes and people will still love their work, while the bar is much lower for women. This was a very necessary discussion, and I agreed with a large part of it. However, it was during some of this discussion where I had a major problem. Sylvia Plath's self harm was repeatedly discussed alongside awful crimes committed by people against other people. Self harm is not a crime. Self harm does not make someone a monster. The difference was briefly mentioned, but I do not know why self harm had to even be mentioned. The rest of the book mainly discusses monstrous men who had committed vile crimes - mainly towards women - and Sylvia Plath does not belong. She was a victim of monsters, she was not a monster. It made me quite upset to see her discussed alongside someone who had shot other people, as these acts are not remotely the same.

Capitalism and its effects are discussed throughout this book. This is a vital layer of the discussion, and I appreciated a lot of her comments on this. In the final chapters,
Dederer discusses how in reality, each person's individual choice on whether or not to engage with art is much more important in the scope of their life than it is in a larger capitalist scope, where individual choices make very little difference. On the whole, I agree with her point, and it is an argument I will often chose to have, as those with power often like to deflect responsibility onto individuals, making it their responsibility to make minute changes, distracting from the need for systemic change, which would actually have an effect, with the most obvious example being climate change. However, it is not acknowledged that a large scale action by many individuals, in some circumstances, can have a significant effect, for example when boycotting companies that provide material support to unjust military campaigns, as removing a large flow of money is effective. On the whole, Dederer's point applies, asserting that while individuals agonise over decisions on whether to consume art, considering whether it makes them a good or bad person to either not consume or consume, there are enormous capitalist systems which commit enormous atrocities and are run by people who appear to be able to sleep soundly at night, and this is the real problem.


In the final chapter, the question that has hovered over the whole book is addressed. "What do we do about the monsters that we love? Those who are in our immediate circles? Those who we know in real life and interact with regularly?" This is something that I was glad to see addressed, as I feel that this is the more immediate question, the more valuable question, the one that we should be asking. Dederer does not address this in as much depth as I would have liked, but then it is not the subject of the book, so I was not expecting the depth that had been used to examine cases pertinent to the main question of the book. However, it is a subject I would be interested to read more about.


Overall, although a lot of what was discussed was not ground-breaking, it was very interesting to read about all of these issues and others together, linked by the question of 'what do we do with great art by bad people?' And it was very interesting to read how it was summed up at the end. I would recommend this book to most people, ensuring that they would be okay with some of the subject matter discussed (although rarely are the crimes gone into in great details, rather they are normally named and sometimes circumstances are described), as the topic applies to everyone, as everyone is a consumer, and the world of art - and the rest of the world - is full of great things made by bad people.
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