Monsters and their beautiful work

A spin instructor once told me that she never pays for the Kanye West songs she plays in class. The music is good but the artist is ethically questionable, so she refuses to put money behind it. When she wants to play anything by Kanye, she illegally downloads it.

I picked up Claire Dederer’s new book wanting an easy answer to how to deal with Taylor Swift’s enormous carbon emissions, the accusations against Lizzo for fostering a harmful work environment, John Mayer’s pattern of dating women half his age, and Kanye—whose antisemitic and Nazi-sympathizing remarks have made me question if I can listen to even his earliest music. Monsters is Dederer’s attempt to think through what it means to consume art produced by people who have said or done terrible things, from J. K. Rowling to Woody Allen to Roman Polanski to Ernest Hemingway. The word monster shows how we mark these artists as something other than ourselves: “Monster implies—insists—that the person in question is so terrible that we could never be like them.”

Although she begins by asking whether artists can be separated from their biographies, Dederer comes to realize that her project is actually an autobiography of a representative person who consumes art. How do audiences decide what to love and what to hate? Can we “love the art but hate the artist?”