WHAT LIES BENEATH

Grappling with how to approach great works of art by bad men in the book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK 

YOU, ME, AND EVERYONE WE KNOW: WHETHER Y you're aware of it or not, you're in a relationship with a monster.

There is surely some artist whose behavior, known to you or otherwise, is scurrilous, reprehensible, possibly worthy of life imprisonment-and yet you continue to love the work of that artist, defiantly, secretly, or in ignorant bliss. More often than not, this person-it could be a filmmaker, a writer, a painter, a musician-is a man, because more often than not, it's brilliant men who get a pass when it comes to how they behave in everyday life. And so, when it comes to laying blame for these conflicts that roil inside us-can I still watch Woody Allen's Annie Hall and not feel dirty? Is it wrong to feel a frisson of joy as I gaze at the aggressive angles of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon?-the bottom line is that it's men's fault. Why do they have to spoil everything?

And yet with her exhilarating book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, essayist and critic Claire Dederer holds a small lantern aloft in the darkness. it possible to ever separate the art from the artist? And if not, is it possible to find the sweet spot between our rage and our rapture? Those are just some of the questions Dederer both raises and responds to in Monsters, though this isn't so much a book of solutions as it is an examination of how we approach the art we love. Because the more deeply we engage with art, the more troubled we're likely to be over the sins of the people who made it.