Books Issue: Monsters

Examining the dilemma of good art by bad people

by

I’m stubborn. I refuse to watch Leaving Neverland, the 2019 documentary about two men who claim they were sexually abused as children by Michael Jackson. 

The film, apparently, was emotionally devastating. One reviewer, for The Washington Post, begged fans to “turn off the music and listen to these men.” 

I just can’t. I did, however, watch other documentaries that questioned the veracity of their claims, self-consciously feeding my own bias. I don’t disbelieve the accusers, per se. I know their story would upset me. But I want to defend Michael — his music, his complex persona, his tragic, complicated biography. He was an artist, after all. I resent the status quo’s too simple good/bad narratives and the public’s mob mentality. 

I am so grateful for Claire Dederer’s book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, for challenging me to think more deeply about good art by bad men. But I am even more grateful to the book for reminding me that I must feel deeply too, that I  simply cannot help but feel, especially when I — rather like a teenager — call myself a “fan.” Teenagers, she says, are less nostalgic. “They’re dealing with their all-too-current feelings.” 

But why should artists we care deeply about be exempted from moral judgements? They shouldn’t, of course. 

Yet I often find myself mounting a defence for many artists who have fallen from grace. Or, for those who never had it in the first place, like the grace those foul-mouthed rappers never have with conservative suburban moms and progressive millennials. Misogyny is wrong, I concur. But I excuse it in Kanye West’s music because it is often ironic, and where it isn’t ironic, it’s perfectly, hauntingly wretched. It’s like Oscar Wilde said. He knows his mind is in the gutter, but he’s looking at the stars. A cheesy quote, but Kanye’s ability to admit his own abject, debased nature has a great personal value for me. (See what I’m doing here? I’m trying to justify my loyalty.)

Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art.

Dederer, an American author, essayist, and reporter first wrote about these kinds of justifications in a 2016 essay for The Paris Review. Her new book guides us through her much expanded thought (and feeling) process, thereby allowing readers to self reflect, too. My tendency, I have learned, is to defend underdogs against the morally self-righteous hordes, even when the morals are sound, even when I share those morals. Mine is not a consistent or even a rational defence. It is very much an emotional one. I know Michael and Kanye are guilty. But I want to keep loving the art that I love, period.

Dederer’s book is timely. The Michael Jackson issue has cooled since 2019. But he is still shrouded in ambiguity. We are still obsessed with dead monsters. Hannah Gadsby tried to wrestle with Picasso in her exhibition It’s Pablo-matic at the Brooklyn Museum this past summer. Even in death, Picasso won. Again. The ghost of that horrible genius, and the spirit in his art, are far more muscular than Gadsby’s politics. 

And fresh monsters arise weekly from under the bed. Our fandom is continually challenged, our loyal hearts battered and bruised. As I write, I periodically check social media, where Canada’s Indigenous communities are reckoning with the sad shock of the latest pretendian reveal, icon and hero Buffy Sainte-Marie.  

Dederer’s book is personal, drawing on her taste in art and on her own life experiences. It isn’t Michael or Kanye for her. It’s Polanski and sometimes Woody. She submits their work to her searching exegesis with innervated prose. The subjectivity in her writing feels crucial. Dederer quotes scholar Donna Haraway: “Objectivity is a conquering gaze from nowhere.” 

And then she very nearly solves the age-old ‘separating the artist from the art’ riddle with this beautiful summation: “Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.” If you think you might disagree, read Dederer’s pages on our “biographical age.”

Where the book is most helpful and convicting though, is where she took a wider view, placing our agonized attempts to rationalize our love for monster-made art into the larger context of #MeToo and the election of Trump. In these events, Dederer says, many Americans were stripped of the historical perspective that people living in the present often have, meaning it is common to look back at racist or sexist or antisemitic artists from the past with a “they didn’t know any better” lens, coupled with an inherent belief in moral progress. 

But then, she points out, they elected a known evil — Trump. Then we witnessed thousands of women come forward with stories of abuse. Our question has to change then from “What should we do about the sins from the past now that we’re enlightened?” to “What should we do about sins from the past, when we haven’t improved?” (She does point out that Jewish people and people of colour are under no such illusions of progress.)

Monsters is a trustworthy, engrossing, and entertaining exploration of a dilemma that, Dederer maintains, can’t ever be cleared up or ironed out of anyone’s soul, at least absolutely. I use the word trustworthy because Dederer spends pages contending with her own inner monster too, and because her deep anger at what many “monsterific” artists have done is tempered by compassion — “a life means more than the terrible things he or she did.” 

I would have liked her to go on, to elucidate further her thoughts on the role of capitalism and consumer culture. The music industry does not concern itself with ethics, she writes, but “passing the problem to the consumer is how capitalism works.” Her ideas about the “staining” of the work of art by the artist’s atrocities could also become further chapters. Does she see the parallels of this idea to Lady Macbeth’s “damn spot”or to the scarlet stain, the crimson stain of biblical symbolism?

I loved Michael Jackson as a kid. What kid didn’t? We knew, I think, that it was the most glorious stage show on offer. We felt the neon zing of the 1980s, the hot sizzle of it in his moves and his music. We knew too, that Michael was different, better, some kind of bird, a dove, a weirdo, an original. Who else would wear one glove? Who else eschewed brawn for angular, rake-thin agility? Who else could snap their fingers to the side like that? No one. That’s who.

Even as a kid, I knew he was doomed. He was too hollow-cheeked not to be. He didn’t fit here. He’d have to fly away. He was the stage-magic of childhood. He also stole childhoods. I will have to hold these things in terrible tension, in irreconcilable contradiction. And as Dederer says, I will be the hypocrite, too. ■

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, Knopf, 2023.

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