The Monsters Who Make Good Art

'Rosemary's Baby' and some thoughts about the futility of separating the art from the artist.

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I’ve been reading Monsters, Claire Dederer’s essay collection on problematic artists and the art they make. Each chapter uses a different bad filmmaker (like Roman Polanski), musician (like Wagner), author (like Hemingway) or artist (like Picasso) as a jumping off point for some more pointed thoughts about the bad behavior of great artists. 

The book has been helpful for me, giving language to something that’s sort of hard to talk about for the sheer reason that it’s something that just is. There’s nothing to be done about it. You can’t resolve the tension. You can’t diminish it. I don’t expect anything you read in that book — or here, for that matter — will make it any easier to process the problem of bad artists who create good art. It is simply There.

Monsters avoids the two major pet peeves that often come up in these conversations: either diminishing the badness of the behavior (“lots of older men dated teenagers at the time!”) or diminishing the goodness of the art (“Picasso wasn’t that good anyway.”) Dederer is both righteously appalled by these artists’ behavior and righteously enthralled by their work.