What is one to do upon discovering that a favorite artist is a monster? That\u2019s one of the questions that Dixon, an assistant professor of philosophy at Cardiff University, grapples with in this provocative work. Her goal is \u201cto take you on a journey through the history of immoral art, exploring some of the most controversial and volatile works humanity has ever produced,\u201d from \u201cerotic literature that has inspired murderers\u201d to \u201cbeautiful paintings created by paedophiles.\u201d Dixon compares the concept of depraved art to a \u201cHydra of five screeching heads\u201d and identifies five areas of closer investigation: the varying definitions throughout history of what constitutes obscenity; art that incites, or is believed to have incited, criminal behavior; cultural products that \u201cprop up systems of oppression\u201d by objectifying women as in \u00c9douard Manet\u2019s Le d\u00e9jeuner sur l\u2019herbe (1863) or suggesting the inferiority of people of color; immoral artists whose works are meant to malign or demean, as when Paul Gauguin, a predator who \u201cused his colonial privilege to sexually abuse girls as young as thirteen,\u201d painted Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), \u201cthe depiction of a dark-skinned girl in an abusive relationship with an older white man\u201d; and the question of works in which acts of cruelty are part of their creation, from \u201cthe problematic use of ivory in medieval sculpture across the world to twentieth-century conceptual art that involves setting live animals on fire.\u201d She concludes with a timely chapter on authoritarian attempts to manipulate culture by \u201cnot only targeting the art of persecuted groups, but driving out any cultural products which threaten their totalitarian power,\u201d from Nazi book burnings to President Trump\u2019s \u201cOrwellian\u201d attacks on American museums. Whatever one\u2019s opinion on the question of whether one can or should separate the art from the artist, readers will find much to ponder in this well-researched effort.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What is one to do upon discovering that a favorite artist is a monster? That\u2019s one of the questions that Dixon, an assistant professor of philosophy at Cardiff University, grapples with in this provocative work. Her goal is \u201cto take you on a journey through the history of immoral art, exploring some of the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7039,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}