Can I still listen to Kanye? Should I hate Bill Murray now? Ask Claire Dederer. She won’t judge you
How should we feel about great art made by bad people? Or as author Claire Dederer writes, summarizing decades of controversies into a tidy thought: “They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and made something great.”
Claire Dederer does not carry a portable confessional, but she might want to consider the investment. We sat beside each other recently in the lobby of a School of the Art Institute of Chicago building on Michigan Avenue. I wondered: Are people asking you to judge them? She smiled a big smile that could only be interpreted one way: You have no idea how many people ask. Dederer, an author and essayist from Seattle, was in town to talk about “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma,” her latest book, and without question the finest one-volume wrangling with a very contemporary dilemma:
How should we feel about great art made by bad people?
Or as Dederer writes, summarizing decades of controversies into a tidy thought: “They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and made something great.”
Six years ago, in The Paris Review, her essay “What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?” became the most widely circulated writing on this argument, which is often long on piety and short on nuance. Now she’s asked about painters, composers. Students ask how they should think about David Bowie (who was accused of sleeping with young groupies). WGN radio wanted to know what to do with Michael Jackson. A lot of journalists want to know how to feel about the artist once known as Kanye West. During a stop on the book tour, a woman at the University Club of Chicago “seemed to think she should be able to watch Fred Astaire in blackface and not be bothered at all!”
Dederer was waiting for Eileen Favorite, an SAIC instructor who has taught a class for 23 years on the trouble with good art created by bad people. At the end of a semester, each student makes a case for or against an artist whose behavior resulted in personal scrutiny; then the class votes on the strength of the argument. Favorite arrived in a tizzy.
“It was a tie!” she said.
Dederer smiled tentatively and laughed, uncertain how to respond, the way you are when someone is excited about something that you don’t completely understand yet.
“We’ve never had a tie!” Favorite said.
“Oh, OK!” Dederer said. “I love this teaching energy!”
“Boy,” Favorite continued, “do my students hate J.D. Salinger.”
“People are fed up with the guy,” Dederer said.
“They think Seymour (of the classic short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”) is a pedophile and I cannot talk them out of it. He kisses a girl’s foot then returns to his room and he shoots his brains out — which I always did think was such a stupid ending.”
“Another strike against Salinger,” Dederer said, “was he hated ice cream.”
With that, we headed to class.
Dederer read a chapter from “Monsters” that described taking her children to see an exhibit on Picasso and the women he painted; then she asked Favorite’s 18 or so students, seated in a wide circle around the cold, spare classroom: “Do you think there is more institutional awareness of this stuff now? I mean, call a show ‘Picasso’s Women,’ and considering his abuse of them — I’m not sure if you could just call it good art now and still get away with it.” A student said she was at the Art Institute recently and noticed Gauguin is shown without mention that he had sex (and children) with Tahitian teens he painted. Gauguin made Picasso possible, behavior-wise, Dederer noted. “You know, I was talking to an interviewer last week and he said he felt sorry for my children, because they would never be able to take in Picasso’s work now without the context.”
Students gasped.
“Yeah,” Dederer said, “my kids are not getting to have their innocence.”
“No!” a student said, mock-outraged.
“Yes,” Dederer said.
“Sad,” a student quipped, “now they can’t see cigarette burns on a woman without the context.” Dederer snorted a laugh. Which made the students laugh. They regarded her with thoughtful, watchful faces, leaning forward, waiting to jump into the fray. It was a smart group, and like Dederer, less interested in passing judgment on an artist than understanding their own complex emotional responses. The victim of Roman Polanski’s statutory rape in 1977 has since forgiven him, one student said, but does that mean we’re obligated to forgive him? No, Dederer said. Forgiveness is not our responsibility.
A student interjected: “If we are consuming media from someone who has abused women, that does not mean you have abused women, or even support women. I feel like in America we hold this belief that you need to consume media that reflects your personality. You need to identify with what you consume. And it’s not necessarily true.”
No, Dederer agreed.
But the “scorched-earth way we discuss this” tends to skip past how much we do identify with beloved artists. Bowie was not merely a singer but, for generations, a way to move through the world. Kanye was not just a rapper but an example of how to create fearlessly. Dederer noted J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter crafted a world for many, then excluded many of those same people when she made controversial statements about transgender identity. Dederer herself, in “Monsters,” wrestles with the question of how to watch Woody Allen movies: If she watches “Manhattan” at a friend’s house, not paying herself for the video, maybe it’ll be better? Like many in the 1970s, she once thought of Allen and his films as a blueprint for how to be an adult. And now she finds it impossible to see past the opening of “Manhattan,” in which Allen and his 17-year-old girlfriend (who is still in high school) have dinner with a couple in their 40s.
She refers throughout the book to “the stain,” the way the ugly details in an artist’s life become more indelible than those voices who insist we can separate an artist from their art. “A lot of this happens in a way that we are not even in control of,” she told the class. “Love of an artist can be incredibly important, even lifesaving for a lot of people. If this conversation only focuses on those things that are wrong, there is no dilemma, and no acknowledgment of the love which has brought us all to this room, at this moment.”
A day later, on a bench in Lincoln Square, Dederer sighed: “People really just want to know what to do.” And yet, she will not tell them how to feel. In fact, she wants the book to be a self-indictment of her own conflicts, a book-length argument with herself. She’s less interested in discussing so-called cancel culture than how people wield that phrase to self-serving ends. She wishes she could be more monster herself. A chunk of the book considers how female artists are condemned for making room in their life for art. (She writes: If sexual assault is the worst thing a male artist tends to be accused of, abandoning family is the worst thing that a female artist gets accused of.)
When she writes that the more “we draw our identity” from an artist and their art, “the more collapsed the distance between us and them,” I told her that I thought of Chicago: It’s hard to imagine this place ever turning on, say, Bill Murray, even if Hollywood does.
He emerged at a time, in the 1970s, when a touch of naughty behavior even lent value.
“You’ve just described rock music,” she said.
“The Rolling Stones,” I said.
“A hundred percent. I think of that period of rock star as the descendants of Picasso and Hemingway, in that they took (bad behavior) and made it part of what was sold.”
The students in Favorite’s class, for their semester-long mud baths with artists, studied Jim Morrison and Bowie, Stanley Kubrick and Yoko Ono, Marvin Gaye, even Kevin Clash, the creator of Elmo, who left Sesame Street because of allegations of sexual impropriety (which he denied). A student using Elvis Presley as her case study told Dederer about “the almost religious following that puts some rock stars on a godlike pedestal — at one point, he’s on like 10 different sedatives and still performing, which does start to look almost godlike, and kind of becomes them doing whatever they want.”
Dederer wrote a chapter on rock stars, then cut it.
“It was just the same story, over and over,” she told the students. “Through the ‘60s, into the ‘80s, they have sex with young girls, use a certain accepted violence, then fall apart over drugs. But mostly, they abuse young girls, because, as Polanski said, it’s what people wanted to do — to the point (during the hair-metal years) the expected transmission of that behavior almost replaces music. You remember ‘Behind the Music’? I almost thought for some of those bands it should have been ‘Instead of the Music.’”
A student asked: Does fame make people worse? Or is there a certain kind of person …
Dederer said: “That’s like the question: What kind of (expletive) runs for president?”
Another student pointed out these conversations seem to suggest that if we stop watching or listening to an artist, they stop. Some artists don’t necessarily do any of this for an audience. “And just because you’ve stopped listening to R. Kelly doesn’t mean —”
“He can’t just make music from prison,” Favorite said.
Dederer offered some advice:
“I don’t want to disrupt the point of this class, but how you consume art is not going to make you a good or a bad person. You are going to have to find another way to do that.”
The students laughed.
“See, the big problem we all have with this subject,” she said, “is you’ve been told to balance two things. I make a joke in the book that it would be great if only we had a calculator: Put in the artist, crime and the quality of the art, and it spits out your answer.” But each of them brings their biography to these works, she said. Besides, “if you want to dance to R. Kelly at your wedding, you think I’m going to tell you that you shouldn’t?”
They laughed.
“You know,” Dederer said warmly, “you guys, you’re the ultimate good-faith group.”
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