“A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.”

I picked this book up in the gallery shop when I visited the Whitworth in Manchester. It seemed like a very topical issue, in the age of “cancel culture” and something which I have discussed at length. I feel like my views on this issue – can you separate the art from the artist? And what to do with the art of “monsters” – are quite militant and not especially nuanced. I have no qualms with boycotting, since I couldn’t enjoy artwork in the knowledge that the artist committed some heinious crime. In the digital era, where your attention is currency – I refuse to waste my valuable attention on content produce by abuser, rapists, paedophiles, murderers, etc.

I therefore found this book quite tiresome, in its endless deliberations on the matter. Yes, it did contain some interesting points about the nature or “fandom” and “genius”, the currency of consumption and the role of capitalism in perpetuating this issue – however, I felt that these points could have been made much more concisely and the book was largely substantiated by self-indulgent waffle. I’ve noticed a trend recently, for non-fiction books to be written with a “personal narrative” including an excessive number of personal anecdotes from the author, alongside their personal deliberations. Personally, I find this to be incredibly tiresome drivel, the author’s personal life is not of interest to me nor why I am reading the book.

I was interested to learn the backstory on the woman who shot Andy Warhol, as well as her analysis of the infamous Lolita, but otherwise the book didn’t present me with many novel ideas of thoughts. Just a lot of ethical ambiguity on her own part. I also strongly disagre with the conclusion she eventually came to after 250 pages of deliberation which seems to be that you can’t choose who you love because love is irrational, and therefore humans are inevitably condemned to forgive and continue loving those who commit misdemeanours. If that were so, nobody would ever escape from an abusive relationship. As someone who has personally gone through the traumatic realisation, that you have no obligation or duty to continue loving or maintaining a relationship with those who emotionally, psychologically or physically abuse you – I have little patience for this conclusion.

I recently came to my own realisation, that nothin gmuch matters in life other than how you treat people. Being “stressed at work” because your chasing another promotion / career goal can never justify mistreating your family or abusing your partner. No amount of greatness, or “genius” can justify causing someone else harm. I’m resolute in my own conclusion on the matter and I refuse to waste my time / money / attention on the work of monsters. 

‘The poet William Empson said life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis. I found myself in the midst of one of those contradictions. Polanski would be no problem for the viewer at all – just another example of how some men happen to be black holes – if the films were bad. But they’re not.’ (page 6)

‘I didn’t want to compile a catalogue of monsters – after all, wasn’t the history of art simply already that? I had a dawning realisation – I was trying to find out not about the artists, but my problem. I had a glimmer of a thought: I wanted to write an autobiography of the audience.’ (page 8)

‘Pablo Picasso, Lead Belly, Miles Davis, Phil Spector. Add your own; add a new one every week, every day. Charlie Rose. Carl Andre. Johnny Depp. They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and they made something great. The awful thing disrupts the great work; we can’t watch or listen to or read the great work without remembering the awful thing. Flooded with knowledge of the maker’s monstrousness, we turn away, overcome by disgust. Or… we don’t We continue watching, separating or trying to separate the artist from the art. Either way: disruption.’ (page 14)

‘”We” can be an escape hatch from responsibility. It can be a megaphone. But it can also be a casting out. Us against them. The morally correct people against the immoral ones. The process of making someone else wrong so that we may be more right.’ (page 39)

‘thinking about all these complicated men I loved, the word [monster] had come to take on a new meaning. It meant something more nuanced, and something more elemental. It meant: someone whose behaviour disrupts our ability to apprehend the work on its own terms.’ (page 43)

‘The tainting of the work is less a question of philosophical decision-making than it is a question of pragmatism, or plain reality. That’s why the stain makes such a powerful metaphor: its suddenness, it’s permanence, and above all its inexorable realness. The stain is simply something that happens. The stain is not a choice. The stain is not a decision we make.’ (page 44)

‘A truism of our moment in history is that we live in the time of the fan. As biography rises, as its shadow called cancel culture escalates, fan culture also ascends. In the accelerated endgame of the age of mechanical reproduction, the fan is both debased and exalted. The work, designed to be reproduced, needs a large body of consumers. The “I” of the audience must become “we” in order for the market to work… An audience member is a consumer of a piece of art. A fan, on the other hand, is a consumer plus, a consumer beyond, a consumer who is also being consumed.’ (page 51)

‘The backlash across the internet was great fury. Many of the former Potter kids were trans and they were rightly very angry. But underneath the fury was a deepn sadness; the sadness of the staining of something beloved. Rowling’s tale of a place where otherness was accepted didn’t in the end include them.’ (page 59)

‘I noticed that a certain kind of person appeared to be immune to the stain. A certain kind of person demanded to be loved, no matter how bad his behaviour – and we (oh, we) all agreed he was worthy of love. This was the person called the genius. This person might be stained – in fact almost always is stained – but the stain seems not to dent his importance. His primacy… “Genius” is a spectral, sacred word, yet it lands with the thud of fact.’ (page 81)

‘And yet- isn’t genius the person who changes everything about his or her field? Thomas Kuhn called this a paradigm shift, before the word “paradigm” got taken over by corporate dipshits and lazy undergrads. If you go by that definition, Duchamp is actually a greater artist than Picasso.’ (page 89)

‘Picasso’s granddaughter Marina wrote in her memoir: “He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.” It’s no crime to love a lot of women – even if it makes the women in question cross or jealous or crazy or suicidal. But of course Picasso was also abusive towards these women (beatings and burnings), and moreover he was a predator of young girls, who fascinated him and whom he used as models.’ (page 93)

‘Picasso is the man who had sex with two separate women on the same day, and painted them both. The sex is as important as the painting.’ (page 95)

‘Why does all this matter? Because genius informs our idea of who gets to do what. Who gets to have license. Who gets to give in to their impulses. Whom we choose to aid and abet when they do indulge in those impulses. When genius is tied to masculinity – a masculinity that continually reasserts itself – then someone is being left out.’ (page 103)

‘We allow the genius to give in to his impulses; he is said to have demons. Demons are cousins to the artistic impulse… The Devil made me do it, we say – and is that really so different from the experience of being inspired by a muse?’ (page 103)

‘[Stephen] Fry says that it’s Hitler and Nazism that have stained Wagner. But Wagner wasn’t stained by history, he stained himself – his anti-Semitism isn’t wrong because it inspired Hitler; it’s wrong in and of itself.’ (page 120)

‘We shouldn’t punish artists for their subject matter. But we do. We punish artists for their subject matter all the time. Now more than ever. Could Lolita be published today? I doubt it. The story of a serial predator who grooms a young girl, abducts her, takes her on a cross-country road trip, rapes her every night and in the mornings too, and prevents her escape at every turn? And we only get his point of view? It’s impossible know whether or not the book would be published now, but it’s easy to imagine an outraged reception.’ (page 138)

‘Lolita’s inner life is ignored by Humbert, and seems to be ignored by Nabokov. But her voicelessness becomes a glimmering, heartbreaking absence at the center of the novel. The book is ultimately not (or not just) a portrait of a monster, but a portrait of a girl’s annihilation.’ (page 145)

‘The truth is, art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.’ (page 163)

‘Maybe, as a female writer, you don’t kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something, some giving part of yourself. When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgetings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left un-telephoned, spousal sex un-had. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.’ (page 172)

‘Hemingway’s wife, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn’t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (I guess she she would know.) She’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it.’ (page 174)

‘For [Joni] Mitchell, separating the life from the art was not an aesthetic question, but a point of view necessary to her survival. In other words, she wasn’t confronting the problem as an audience member, but as an artist.’ (page 201)

Quoting Doris Lessing, she writes ‘”I should have earned an identity that would justify my having left them” … The new identity – the identity called “artist” – is what would justify the abandonment.’ (page 206)

‘Rage is the emotion of the powerless,” said my therapist sometime in the mid-1990s.’ (page 211)

‘For [Valerie] Solanas, getting our asses in gear means getting rid of the men. Not all women can be trusted with this charge; only SCUM – “Hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth” – are up to the task. The manifesto whipsaws you. One moment you’re nodding along with her rage, the next you’re wondering “How did we end up here?” as she talks about ramming ice picks up assholes.’ (page 214)

‘In a nutshell, addicts are often people who have been badly hurt – sometimes by other people, sometimes by more structural abuses like poverty and racism. When we sit in a room and accept our fellow monsters, this knowledge – of our own experiences with pain – informs that acceptance as well. We’re monsters and we’re victims.’ (page 236)

‘When we ask “what do we do with the art of monstrous men?” we are putting ourselves into a static role – the role of consumer. Passing the problem onto the consumer is how capitalism works. A series of decisions is made – decisions that are not primarily concerned with ethics – and then the consumer is left to figure out how to respond, how to parse the correct and ethical way to behave.’ (page 238)

‘Given the role we inhabit, it’s natural for us to try to solve injustice and inequity through our individual choices. This feels like a great idea, but unfortunately it doesn’t really work. “The problem is that the model of individual responsibility assumed by most versions of ethics” can have “little purchase on the behaviourof Capital or corporations”.’ (page 239)

‘Stephen Fry loves Wagner; the college students quizzing me about David Bowie love David Bowie; I love Polanski. Those facts might not be ideal, might even be depressing, but they are true.’ (page 253)

‘How often this describes our relationships with our families, our spouses, sometimes even our children. It’s the problem and it’s the solution, this durable nature of love, the way it withstands all the shit we throw at it, the bad behaviour, the disappointments, the tantrums, the betrayals. What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them. Families are hard because they are the monsters (and angels, and everything in between) that are foistered upon us. They’re unchosen monsters.’ (page 256)

‘Love is not reliant on judgement, but on a decision to set judgement aside. Love is anarchy. Love is chaos. We don’t love the deserving; we love flawed and imperfect human beings, in an emotional logic that belongs to an entirely different weather system than the chilly climate of reason.’ (page 257)