Monsters

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 reader, to do the same.

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'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

Additional information

Weight 220 g
Dimensions 196 × 128 × 24 mm
Author

Publisher

Sceptre

Imprint

Sceptre

Cover

Paperback

Pages

288

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

700.1 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K