![]() ![]() ![]() “When I come to this question - the question of what to do with the art of monstrous men - I don’t come as an impartial observer. ![]() This means she must get into the murky territory of our reactions to art, which are more often emotional than rational and connected to our own identities and histories: “I wanted to write an autobiography of the audience,” she explains, and by audience, she means herself and others like her. ![]() To plumb the depths of this dilemma, Dederer realizes early on, she has to direct her attention to the audience - the consumers who are put in the untenable position of loving the art but not the artist. In a larger and more urgent sense, Dederer is addressing one of the central problems of cancel culture: What do we do with monstrous men? Claire Dederer begins Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma with the earnest desire “to solve the problem of Roman Polanski,” which is “the problem of loving someone who had done such a terrible thing.” Polanski is perfect for launching such an examination because “there is no other contemporary figure who balances these two forces so equally: the absoluteness of the monstrosity and the absoluteness of the genius.” ![]()
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