Monsters
What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People?
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- 75,00 kr
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The must-read book for fans everywhere
'How rare and nourishing this sort of roaming thought is and what a joy to read'
MEGAN NOLAN, Sunday Times
'An exhilarating, shape-shifting exploration of the perilous boundaries between art and life'
JENNY OFFILL
Pablo Picasso beat his partners. Richard Wagner was deeply antisemitic. David Bowie slept with an underage fan. But many of us still love Guernica and the Ring cycle and Ziggy Stardust.
And what are we to do with that love? How are we, as fans, to reckon with the biographical choices of the artists whose work sustains us?
Wildly smart and insightful, Monsters is an exhilarating attempt to understand our relationship with art and the artist in the twenty-first century.
'An incredible book, the best work of criticism I have read in a very long time' NICK HORNBY
'Part memoir, part treatise, and all treat' New York Times
'Clever and provocative' Daily Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What's a fan to do when they love the art, but hate the artist? asks book critic and essayist Dederer (Love and Trouble) in this nuanced and incisive inquiry. She contends that "consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting," those of the artist and the audience, and it's the plight of the latter that these meditations focus on. Dederer reflects on her attempts to reconcile her feminist principles with her admiration for the films of Roman Polanski, pokes holes in the excuses made for composer Richard Wagner's antisemitism, and suggests that such "geniuses" as Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway received a "special dispensation" from the public to act like monsters: "Maybe we have created the idea of genius to serve our own attraction to badness." Examining the role of the critic, she pushes back on a male writer who told her to judge Woody Allen's Manhattan solely on its aesthetic merits and posits that instead "criticism involves trusting our feelings" about both the art and the artists' crimes. There are no easy answers, but Dederer's candid appraisal of her own relationship with troubling artists and the lucidity with which she explores what it means to love their work open fresh ways of thinking about problematic artists. Contemplative and willing to tackle the hard questions head on, this pulls no punches.
