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Monsters

What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People?

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Monsters

By: Claire Dederer
Narrated by: Claire Dederer
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About this listen

A passionate, provocative and blisteringly smart interrogation of how we experience art in the age of #MeToo, and whether we can separate an artist's work from their biography.

What do we do with the art of monstrous men? Can we love the work of Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, Hemingway and Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is history an excuse? What makes women artists monstrous? And what should we do with beauty, and with our unruly feelings about it?

Claire Dederer explores these questions and our relationships with the artists whose behaviour disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms. She interrogates her own responses and her own behaviour, and she pushes the fan, and the listener, to do the same. Morally wise, deeply considered and sharply written, Monsters gets to the heart of one of our most pressing conversations.

©2023 Claire Dederer (P)2023 Penguin Audio Art Ethics & Morality Literary History & Criticism Philosophy Social Sciences

Critic Reviews

"Monsters is an incredible book, the best work of criticism I have read in a very long time. It's thrillingly sharp, appropriately doubtful, and more fun than you would believe, given the pressing seriousness of the subject matter. Claire Dederer's mind is a wonder, her erudition too; I now want her to apply them to everything I'm interested in so I can think about them differently." (Nick Hornby)

"An exhilarating, shape-shifting exploration of the perilous boundaries between art and life. This timely book inhabits both the marvellous and the monstrous with generosity and wit." (Jenny Offill)

"A blisteringly erudite and entertaining read. Dederer holds the moral ambiguity of her subject matter, landing her arguments with precision and flair. It's a book that deserves to be widely read and will provoke many conversations." (Nathan Filer)
All stars
Most relevant
I was drawn to this book because it seemed to be addressing the exact question I was asking: can we reconcile monstrous creators and their glorious art? This book does more than ponder this question, though. Part memoir, social commentary, literary critique, it shows that the problem is bigger than a simple question.
I’m grateful for this book and for Dededer’s brain. What a brilliant read.

Fascinating book

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Claire Dederer has written an eloquent, thought provoking, critical and educational book about a topic that is difficult to approach. It would have been easy to describe the monsters and insist that’s the only category they fit in. Instead, Dederer digs deeper and shows the reader that the monsters can be more human than what we like to admit. At no point does Dederer excuse the monsters and their behaviour but she focuses on the fact that the current patriarchal systems protect them and that it’s hard to take them down easily. In addition, Dederer makes a case for being able to do both - love the art (movie, book, painting) but hate the monster behind it. To finish her book, Dederer examines whether she (and we as a collective) are monsters and the attempted answers are uncomfortable but presented in a way that allows the reader to reflect safely and with encouragement.

Outstanding book

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I think I need to actually read this book. It listened like a podcast and I enjoyed listening to the author narrate but there are so many thoughtful points that become lost in the thick of it. A fairly short book under 10 hours of listening.
My feeling is the ongoing importance of education for the young so they can be empowered to make good decisions when they come up against a dark situation. We need more books like this and more teachers. Michelle Obama is one such person.

Important ideas to grapple with

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The audiobook was fabulously read - I enjoyed the memoir aspects of the author’s background and learned about some new people through this book! I appreciated the acknowledgement of privilege and the existential idea of humans making meaning - in the sense, what it means to be a mother and/or artist. Ultimately, continuing to follow or support, read or listen to a ‘monster’ is totally subjective - we find and make meaning of the strangest things as humans…

Ultimately, subjective!

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I enjoyed this audiobook a lot. While I’ve read reviews that have gripes about the memoir elements, I found that those are the bits in which the author most successfully grapples with the ethical dilemmas the book explores in a way that returns again and again to undoing the universalising and innocenting “we” and interrogating her own attempts to distance herself from the problem at hand and her own tendencies to monstrosity. The final chapter was the clearest enunciation of the problem of the “monster” not as a problem for the individual “consumer” of art to solve, as late capitalism would have it, but rather symptomatic of a society of systematic oppressions that venerates powerful individuals (men, and especially white men, as well as bourgeois white women) at the expense and expendability of all others. The author definitely has long detours into liberal individualist thinking (that she somewhat self-critiques for) and some frustratingly white feminist desires for the freedoms of the (white) male artist (that would also be at the expense of others, and in particular she is concerned with how that might be at the expense of her own children) without instead pausing to wonder whether this model itself is symptomatic of a bigger problem, that is more to do with whiteness and upper-middle-class ideologies of artmaking than actually what making art (including great art) might “require”. So for me that last chapter was somewhat redemptive, and I enjoyed the honesty of her own journey.

A few extra gripes of my own include the lack of insight into the monstrosities of colonialism even when talking about the individualist superiority fantasies of white women from *Rhodesia* (I’m not sure the word Zimbabwe is even mentioned). And, naturally — also in true white feminist style — the possibility of those of us outside the gender binary even existing seems foreign to this text. I guess in part these represent further questions on what constitutes a “monster” (genocide, apartheid, white supremacy, cisheterosexist erasure) but those are also far more systematic monstrosities for which individuals are not so readily deemed culpable.

Locating the monster

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.