Abuse of artistic genius comes as no surprise. For hundreds of years, the work of some of humanity’s most accomplished (and overwhelmingly male) artists has been tainted by their monstrous biographies, from Wagner, to Miles Davis, to Kanye West, from Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, to Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. Their crimes vary in scale and subject, but time and time again the monsters’ behaviour raises the same questions: how do they keep getting away with it? And what keeps us coming back to their art, “even after everything”?

In 2017, the critic and essayist Claire Dederer posed these questions in an article for the Paris Review, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”. This was weeks after the New York Times published a damning investigation into Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault – triggering the “American #MeToo explosion” – though Dederer had already been writing a book on the subject for some time. As a result, the article was dropped into a polarised landscape of hot takes and open wounds, where an ambiguous approach to historic injustice could easily have fallen flat.

“I had really started working on the book the year previous to [the article’s publication], but all of a sudden it was this free-floating piece and people were really excited about it, or they were getting in arguments with it,” Dederer tells Dazed. “As a writer, to have a lot of attention on something that you’re then going to develop is a little bit daunting. As a citizen, or a person, it was exciting [...] to think that nuance could find an audience. It made me feel more hopeful about my fellow humans.”

Almost six years later, the book itself has finally arrived, in the form of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Charting Dederer’s relationship to the artists whose work she’s admired over the course of her life, and how this admiration has been changed (or, more controversially, not changed) by grim biographical revelations, Monsters doesn’t seek to answer the question of what we do with the art of monstrous men, exactly. Instead, the book asks how it is that we can continue to enjoy their work – and that of monstrous women, too – in light of these uncomfortable truths.

How can we continue to dance to David Bowie, when we know he slept with underage fans? How can we watch Rosemary’s Baby, knowing about Polanski’s sexual abuse? Was Joni Mitchell’s music worth putting her child up for adoption? (One of these things is not like the others.) “I’m struggling, honestly, with my love of the work,” Dederer says.

Below, we speak to Dederer about her dislike of the phrase “cancel culture”, the discomfort of loving art made by monsters, and how, ultimately, it could help us locate the monstrousness within ourselves.

Monsters is a very nuanced response to a conversation that was, and still is, dominated by hot takes. How did you resist the pull of that discourse?

Claire Dederer: I am just a very naturally wobbly thinker. I’m somebody who’s thinking about grey areas a lot. I became concerned a couple of years into the writing of the book that I was being ambivalent out of fear of the internet, so that was a really interesting moment where I had to look at what I was writing and say, ‘Am I not taking a side on this because I’m afraid of what will happen if I do?’ But I realised it would be just as false to allow the fear of seeming ambivalent to push me into black-and-white thinking.

Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are two recurring monsters in the book, and you boldly admit to enjoying their work ‘even after everything’. How have you come to terms with that contradiction, and how does it feel to share it publicly?

Clair Dederer: The Paris Review piece [was titled] ‘What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?’ – it’s a brilliant title, and I didn’t write it. But it sort of suggests I’m going to have an answer for you. When I was working on the book, I was more interested in a depiction of the experience of continuing to love the work and wanting to consume the work.

It didn’t feel exposing or nervous-making to write about that, because I was approaching it more as a literary writer might, where I’m looking at the landscape of the experience and what’s really happening when there is beloved work and this terrible knowledge. That took me out of the discomfort. It was just my job to keep going, trying to understand what was happening.

“There was this sort of terrible, beastly idea of a monster... but then there’s also something, for a mother and a woman, that was aspirational about this idea” – Claire Dederer

The monstrousness of other figures, like David Bowie, is maybe more contentious.

Claire Dederer: Bowie was always fascinating, because, to me, he had never been stained. I knew that he had had sex with young groupies, but it somehow just bounced off of him. Maybe that was just because I required him so much. As a weird kid, and as someone who was struggling with my own identity, he was so important. 

What was interesting was the audience change, for young people. They were really troubled by this knowledge about Bowie. That was one of the fascinating things about him as a character, the way his perception shifted from me, who is 56, to a 20-year-old who was really troubled by this knowledge. We can write off the concerns of the young and say that it’s ‘cancel culture’ or use other dismissive words, but I think the young have been steeped in this moral quandary, and they take it so much more seriously. It’s part of what they’ve experienced growing up on the internet. It was interesting to see something that didn’t trouble me that much, trouble them so much.

What do you think makes some ‘stains’ stick, and others vanish in the wash?

Claire Dederer: One thing that sticks is when someone’s persona is really close to the crime. I think that’s why people find Woody Allen so unsettling, because the work itself reflects the thing that we came to learn about him, right? If you look at Bill Cosby, it’s the exact opposite. It’s kind of at the other end of the spectrum, where his persona is so counter to what he’s been accused of. It can be sticky in different ways, but often it’s when there’s either adjacency or really strong contrast.

“We can write off the concerns of the young and say that it’s ‘cancel culture’ or use other dismissive words, but I think the young have been  steeped in this moral quandary, and they take it so much more seriously” – Claire Dederer

In the book, you take a critical approach to the phrase ‘cancel culture’. Why?

Claire Dederer: I think people need to have the power to say things that have happened to them. I think that’s really important. I think that we need to listen to accusers, and accusers need to have ways in which they can speak up. But I think that when we call that speaking up ‘cancel culture’, it’s a predetermined invalidation of those statements. It’s a way that we can put a framework around those statements to make them not matter. The term itself, ‘cancel culture’, is so loaded, and so dismissive, and has so many sediments of disdain for the right of these people to speak up. I really detest the phrase for that reason. 

Monsters draws out the different conditions for ‘monstrousness’ in men and women. Why do you think the bar for women is so much lower than for men?

Claire Dederer: I think that women do most, if not all, of the nurturing, and a lot of the ways the world moves along are dependent on women doing the work of care. The often unpaid, often undervalued work of care. If women start to abandon the work of care, obviously, that needs to be monstered or made wrong, otherwise everything would just fall apart. 

So I think that for women, abandoning the work of care in order to go to work, especially to try to make great art, can be seen as a bad thing and can be internalised by the woman as something to feel bad or guilty about. I was really interested in that tension between the crimes of commission that men are held to account for (or not held to account for) and then the crimes of omission that women are held to account for, which is just, like, not showing up 100 per cent to be caregivers.

And why do you think we don’t see women ascending to the same monstrous heights as the men?

Claire Dederer: So much monstrous behaviour comes from having access to power, to money, to people, to do all of these things. I would love to think that other kinds of people would be better if they were given all that lavish amount of power, but I think that it just comes from their access.

“I was interested in that tension between the crimes of commission that men are held to account for, and then the crimes of omission that women are held to account for, which is just, like, not showing up 100 per cent to be caregivers” – Claire Dederer

The goalposts for what we find monstrous are constantly shifting. How do you think we can navigate this landscape? Does calling out monstrous artists necessarily open us up to claims of hypocrisy?

Claire Dederer: Let’s turn your question inside out: should we not point out injustice, because we’re worried that it will make us more vulnerable? When you put it that way, the answer is clearly no. We should definitely continue to point out injustice, even though it does make us vulnerable.

Anybody who’s ever had a family and been a leftist or a liberal knows what it is to be making a point and have somebody point out your hypocrisy. It’s an inevitable byproduct of wanting things to be better. There’s always going to be the bad faith argument. A subterranean theme of this book is wanting to engage in a good faith way with the world. There are going to be bad faith arguments against my book, but I had to keep writing for the good faith reader.

Monsters also dispels the myth that we’ve reached the apex of moral and political development, as suggested by thinkers like Francis Fukuyama in the 90s. Could you talk a bit about your own realisation that we aren’t the pinnacle of cultural evolution?

Claire Dederer: When I started writing, I was in a much less interrogative relationship with my own liberalism. I just thought, I’m a good person, people are good, I’m doing my best, and when people are bad, we need to call it out. Then, realising the terrible things that happen in the name of liberalism, even now, really radically altered my perspective. It put me in a much more interesting place in relationship to the subject matter.

When I’m looking back at a historical figure, I’m not thinking everything’s all better now, and that I’m looking back on it from this apex of post-Enlightenment liberalism. I can see that there were some people who knew better in the past, and some people who didn’t know better, and the same thing is the case now. The question then becomes: if you’re not better, what is it we’re not seeing or talking about now that we need to point out, that we need to do better? Rather than looking back on the past and saying, ‘Oh, I would have fought the Nazis’... what is it you’re not seeing now, or not doing now, that in 500 years would seem outrageous?

“I don’t think that fucking preteens or punching people in the nose are requirements for great art. I do think setting aside the work of care is” – Claire Dederer

If a level of monstrousness is, on some level, necessary to make great art, do you think it’s worth the trade-off?

Claire Dederer: For the second half of the book, when I’m thinking about monstrousness and women, and the idea of monstrousness as something to aspire to, I’m looking at it as a kind of selfishness. I don’t think that fucking preteens or punching people in the nose are requirements for great art. I do think setting aside the work of care is. That can feel monstrous. I look at Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell, and they’re listed as these abandoning mothers, but in many ways I’m looking at them as paradigmatic figures of who I want to be, because they found a way to make themselves great and sort of shut the door against caring. 

I do think that is a necessary ingredient in great art. The invisible piece is [that] somebody else has to do the fucking caring, right? This gender essentialism, or this biological essentialism, that says that women, especially women of colour, are going to do all the caring, is actually the problem. The dichotomy I set up is between mother and artist, but really what I’m talking about is caregiver and self-expressor. That’s a universal problem, or should be a universal problem. If we could just get more people to do the care.

So it’s not a question of whether it’s worth it or not, as much as that it’s an inevitable fact of art?

Claire Dederer: Yeah. And how can we create systems where more people can have access to that time, money, power, or whatever is needed to express themselves?

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is out now via Sceptre.