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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Coming up tomorrow on All Of It, we'll be joined by actor and comedian Sarah Silverman to discuss her latest comedy special, Someone You Love, and her very interesting and often earnest podcast of the same name of her name, Sarah Silverman Podcast. There's also the great Isabel Allende will be in the studio to talk about her latest novel, The Wind Knows My Name. That is in the future, but right now, let's talk about some things that are not always easy to talk about. Beautiful art by not-so-beautiful people.

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Alison Stewart: If you have a little twinge when you find yourself humming to an R. Kelly song or when you agree that a certain Woody Allen film belongs on a best-of list or maybe you feel the little tug when you hear someone say, "Did you see what JK Rowling tweeted?" you're not alone. Separating the art from the artist has become more difficult because we know so much about so many people, and that's a good thing in some ways.

Awful people can't get away with awful things as easily anymore, but awful people make some awfully exciting work. Critic, essayist, and author Claire Dederer wrestles with this issue in her new book, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma. In it, she writes-- Let me get to page 14. I should have had this ready. Sorry, Claire, but such a good paragraph. She writes, "Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, VS Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather."

Though if we start listing athletes, we'll never stop. What about the women? The list immediately becomes much more tentative. Anne Sexton, Joan Crawford, Sylvia Plath. Does self-harm count? Okay, well, let's get back to the men, I guess. 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 then made something great. The awful 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. Claire joins me now. Claire, welcome to the show.

Claire Dederer: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to bring you in on this conversation and we're all grownups here. We're going to have a grownup conversation. Do you think it is important to separate the art from the artist or do you think an artist's biography is always important? What do you think people should do with the art of "problematic people"? Who is someone whose work you haven't been able to give up and why? We're talking about what to do with great art made by maybe not-so-great people. You can call us at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC.

You can always text us at that number as well. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Our social media is available to you as well @AllOfItWNYC. I go back and forth on this phrase, "art from artists." If you say it too many times, it sounds like a cliché. It's something that's tossed off. If we really think about what it means, it means, "Okay, I'm going to be okay with consuming something. Maybe enjoying something made by somebody who possibly caused harm." Why do you think people have issues with separating the art from the artist and say, "Okay, it's just the art. I'm not interested in the artist"?

Claire Dederer: Yes, I think it's interesting, this idea, this verb separating the art from the artist. It sounds so intentional, right? You just make a decision. I'm going to forget everything I know about R. Kelly and listen to Ignition (Remix). I'm going to forget what I know about Woody Allen and watch Hannah and Her Sisters, but we can't, right? This idea of separating intentionally implies that will can solve this problem.

When we know something about someone, it's a stain that overtakes the work. It shapes our experience of the work whether we want it to or not. This very idea of separating the art from the artist was something I wanted to get at in the book and start to take a look at and really think about if it's even possible. We're so often exhorted or encouraged to do it. Is it possible?

Alison Stewart: You know what? You are in a gorgeous location and I can tell that it's remote, but I'm going to ask you to turn your camera off for a little minute because you're breaking up a little bit. I want to see if that helps the connection. Then maybe we'll get to talk to each other face-to-face again, but we can continue our conversation.

With someone like Woody Allen, you point out the fact that his movie Manhattan is very explicitly about an adult man and a relationship with a teenage girl and that the movie doesn't necessarily feel critical of that relationship. That was, of course, in the '70s. In your writing and thinking about this, does it become more complicated when the biography of the art is similar to the biography of the human?

Claire Dederer: Yes, I think you can go both ways. Woody Allen, of course, is a really interesting example because he made this film in which he's having a relationship as a 40-something man with a 17-year-old girl, who's played by Mariel Hemingway. He has qualms occasionally throughout the film, but they're not very serious. He does this really interesting move of having the affirmation of the relationship placed in the mouth of the girl.

She's the one who says how great their relationship and even how great their sex is. I think that there's this interesting collapse where you see someone who later on went on to have this relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the daughter of his partner, who was then in late adolescence or early young adulthood, however you want to look at it. You see that coloring our experience of watching Manhattan.

Is he grooming us? Is he grooming himself? What's he doing in this film? At the same time, I think it can go the other way. I think it can be really disruptive when the art is so close to the maker. At the same time, if there's a distance, that can also be incredibly disruptive. I'm thinking of the accusations against Bill Cosby and what a distance that puts his public persona from his most beloved character, Dr. Huxtable.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Tom calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Tom, thank you so much for calling to WNYC.

Tom: Hi. Thanks for having us. Let me step inside where I'm not overwhelmed by the truck sounding past me. Yes, I've certainly paid attention to this issue for a long time. As I said to your screener, somebody who's much further up in the scheme like the director or publisher, most famously, Harvey Weinstein, made a lot of great movies. He didn't make them, so him, whatever. It doesn't bother me to see anything produced by him. Then he gets to the artist, Michael Jackson. I still think when Beat It comes on and I'm somewhere with his dancing, I'm going to dance. There were a lot of collaborators.

It might have been his song, but I don't even have a problem with that. Phil Spector, producer. Amazing, amazing music. He had something to do with it. Again, it's a collaborative effort. An individual artist like a painter, I get it. Other people who do something and it's absolutely their work even like film. Like you said, if it's absolutely their work, then I may have a problem. When they're working collaboratively with a lot of people who are having been accused and they're just contributing to that piece of art, I really don't have a problem ever listening to, watching, et cetera.

Alison Stewart: Tom, thank you for calling in. Something I've been thinking about and reading your book and I'm looking at some of the texts that are coming through and the calls, we'll get to more of them. I guess it comes down to-- one of the questions I have is, does accepting the work mean accepting the bad act?

Claire Dederer: Right. I think that, to me, clearly, no. I think that when we talk about this problem, we're talking about a balance between two separate things. The terribleness of the act and then not just the greatness of the work, but its importance in our own individual lives, right? Like Michael Jackson, we're still going to bop around on our seats when we hear him, but he has differing meanings in different people's lives like somebody who danced to him at their wedding.

That's a whole different kind of profile of importance than somebody who just casually listens to him. I think, for me, it's more about balancing the bad thing, but then also holding up and valuing the importance of the art in our lives, which I feel like is the part of this conversation that sometimes gets lost when we start to look at this as a kind of scale.

Alison Stewart: One of the things I thought was very interesting in your book. By the way, my guest is Claire Dederer. The name of the book is Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma. You started with Roman Polanski. I'm very curious about it. As an author, the choice you made is you do not couch what he did at all. You described very graphically, and I'm kind of debating about whether to read it or not, because we're like, "Oh yes, Roman Polanski and a 13-year-old girl, but I'm going to read it."

This is a warning to people that it does involve the word "rape." You detail what happened on March 10th, 1977. "I recite these details from memory. Roman Polanski brought Samantha Gailey to his friend, Jack Nicholson's house in the Hollywood Hills. He urged her into the jacuzzi, encouraged her to strip, gave her a Quaalude, followed her to where she sat on a couch, penetrated her, shifted his position, penetrated her anally, ejaculated. All of these details piled up, but I was left with a simple fact, anal rape of a 13-year-old girl." I thought that was very interesting. Why did you choose to be very, very specific in detail what happened?

Claire Dederer: I think I was trying to get at the way that the details have a presence in my own mind. It's not just that I'm pointing my finger and making sure the reader knows the details. I'm trying to express to the reader all of the knowledge I come to Polanski with. I have written about Polanski extensively. I've researched the crime quite a bit. I also happen to be a really big fan of his work. I'm a former film critic. I've written about his work a lot. When I come to the work, I have simultaneously this love, but I have this knowledge that I can't escape. That moment has protracted so the reader can feel the profile of that knowledge in my own mind.

Alison Stewart: Let's look at Jojo. His text said, "At 56 years old, I don't think people should tell you that you should separate the artist from the art. It's really very personal. I will never not continue to love Michael Jackson's music. To be honest with you, he gets a pass from me whether that's right or wrong. That's just the truth. I will always watch Woody Allen films, Roman Polanski, et cetera, but I don't completely love the artist, and they've done something outrageous." There are so many.

Claire Dederer: Can I dip in on that?

Alison Stewart: Yes, absolutely.

Claire Dederer: I just will say, bravo to Jojo. Basically, I'm not sure if this is a woman or a man, but they've summed up some of the thesis of my book in a very quick text, which I have a lot of respect for. I think that what they're getting at is the fact that each person comes to these artists with their own subjective experience. As I said earlier, maybe you have a different relationship with Michael Jackson than someone else does.

I think that what she's talking about is this idea that we learn the artist's biography. We learn all these rotten things or positive things or whatever things that the artist has done. We know more than ever about the biography of the artist. We come to the work with this knowledge of them, but we also come with our own biographical experience. Each work of art is a meaning of that subjective personal biography with the artist.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Greg calling in from Monmouth County, New Jersey. Hi, Greg. Thank you for calling All Of It.

Greg: Thank you for having me on. I wrestle with this too and particularly about Roman Polanski. I'm a huge fan of Roman Polanski's films. He's a monster. He's an absolute disgusting villain. I understand. I always hear this. You separate the art from the artist, but I always think, "How do you separate the art from himself?" If Roman Polanski is the plant from which his work grows, it's that monstrousness in him runs through his art. That is part of it. If it's connecting with me, it's finding it in me, right? Is that not a reflection of our own? That's what I think it is. I think people want to separate the art from the artist because they don't want to admit that, "Well, whatever evil is in Polanski's heart must be finding it in mine too, whether I am aware of it or not." Thoughts?

Alison Stewart: Thoughts. I think you might have read the book. [laughs] It sounds similar to some of the conclusions you came to, Claire. Claire, are you there? Oh, we'll take more calls until we get Claire back on the line. Let's talk to Jeff from Astoria. Hi, Jeff. Thanks for calling All Of It. Your thoughts, sir?

Jeff: Hi, Alison. Thank you for taking my calls.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Jeff: I think when we have these sorts of discussions, one of the things that's always left out quite honestly is the concept of context and certainly versus immediacy and specifically with context. Richard Wagner made fantastic music. I am in no way condoning anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was probably far more rampant or virulence back when he made that music. Similarly, you look at Picasso.

Again, no way am I defending misogyny, but he was probably more a product of his times, in that misogyny was far more prevalent and not discussed, and probably even encouraged. You have to take, in some ways, the context. Again, I'm not excusing them or defending them. I'm just simply saying that we have to be aware of that. Conversely, when you talk about someone like R. Kelly or Michael Jackson, who were accused of heinous crimes and certainly in R. Kelly's case, convicted of them, those were crimes.

They were crimes before they did it and they were crimes while they did it obviously and they're going to be crimes afterwards. You could argue that their sins are far more indefensible versus some of the other people's sins in so much as they remain sins, but you have to take them in the appropriate context. Even someone like JK Rowling, obviously, I, again, don't support her opinions as it relates to the trans community, but lots of people are struggling with that.

Sadly, it's not clear-cut. It's not decisive in the sense that there are people who harbor similar feelings for her. They're maybe still a minority but a large percentage of the minority, and you have to put that, I think, into context. It's not like JK Rowling is the only person that shares these thoughts and ideas. When we consider these people, these artists, we have to, I think, apply the appropriate context. Frankly, we rarely do.

Alison Stewart: Jeff, I do appreciate. I'm going to dive in here because I think we've got Claire back. Jeff from Astoria, thank you so much. You brought up a lot of really good points. Our guest, Claire Dederer, we're going to dive into it with her after a quick break to make sure we've got her connection clear and we can take more of your calls. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest at this hour is Claire Dederer. Her book is called Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma. Claire, can you hear me? Claire, can you hear me?

Claire Dederer: Yes, I can hear you. Yes, I'm here.

Alison Stewart: Okay, great. We had a caller earlier who talked about context and context in people being a product of their times. People have strong feelings about even that idea, that that should be used as an excuse, or that could be used to understand, the idea of maybe it's not an excuse but an explanation. How do you feel about the product of their time's part of this conversation?

Claire Dederer: I just caught the end of the caller's call, so I'm going to just address a little bit of what he said about JK Rowling. I think that what's so interesting to me is considering the experience of each audience member. He's talking about this idea, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong, but JK Rowling is one example of many people who are mouthing these unsavory, anti-trans opinions. Absolutely, I get the context he's talking about.

At the same time, what I'm thinking about in the book, I'm not so concerned with the artist. I feel like we spend a lot of time talking about the artist. What I'm concerned about is the experience of the audience. Of course, there's people who've said far more disgusting things than JK Rowling. Of course, what she said has been not as strongly voiced as things other people have said, but she happens to have written a world in which people grew up in which they imagine themselves, in which they participate.

Maybe they wrote fan fiction. Maybe they went to conventions. Maybe they saw a Harry Potter-themed band. Maybe they imagined what house they'd be in for decades of their life. There's this participatory quality. For the audience, when she says something that seems to cast them out from her world, it's a very specific experience. It's not necessarily about her per se so much as about them and this experience of a heartbreak, betrayal, and this emotional response.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Mora calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Mora. Thank you for calling All Of It.

Mora: Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm calling to specifically mention living artists who will be positively impacted financially by my consumption. For example, someone like Kanye, who's been repeatedly anti-Semitic. I no longer listen to his music. I pay for Spotify on a monthly basis. I have actively blocked him as one of the music choices that I can listen to. I will not spend money on his work because of what he stands for.

For me, the same line applies to somebody like Woody Allen. With somebody like Picasso, who is no longer of this earth, I have a slightly less complicated experience with his art. I'm sure there are people who would say, "Well, his family and people related to him still benefit if you go to the Picasso Museum or buy a print." I think I'm just interested in that element when our consumption of art actually continues to positively impact an artist who is known to have done something terrible.

Alison Stewart: I want to read a passage from your book, Claire, that follows this line of thought. You write, "When we ask what do we do with the art of monstrous men, we are putting ourselves in a static role, the role of the 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." What do you see as capitalism's role in this conversation?

Claire Dederer: First, I want to jump back to Mora's call and just say, I think that this idea of withholding my money is not one that is the way I approach the problem, but I really respect it and I understand it. Also, I want to say that more than any other artist in the conversations I've been having about this book over the last two months, Kanye comes up. Kanye is the constant problem, which is fascinating to me. Anyway, the idea of the self as consumer is central to our role in capitalist society.

I think what's so interesting in this problem is that you have the moment where somebody says what happened, what we call a cancellation, but let's back up from that word and just say what it actually is. It's somebody raising their hand and saying, "Something terrible happened to me. Somebody famous did this terrible thing to me." Then there's this kind of leapfrogging forward to what the consumer ought to do.

It's like, "Well, are you going to throw out the work of Wagner? How can you throw out the work of Woody Allen? There are so many great films." There's a lot of other stuff to think about in between that has to do with the relationship between the person and the art, that has to do with institutional responsibility for the way these people have been able to move through the world. There's lots of stuff to talk about in terms of gender stuff. I just think it's interesting that we jump to this idea of our power as consumers, which is not really that meaningful to me.

Alison Stewart: Why not?

Claire Dederer: Because I think that unless you can really create a true boycotting, which is something that we're seeing more and more is not necessarily that easy to do, then it's just really about your own self-perception as a consumer rather than about a meaningful punishment of the person.

Alison Stewart: We spoke last--

Claire Dederer: In the sense, you-- I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Alison Stewart: No, please.

Claire Dederer: No, go ahead. Go ahead.

Alison Stewart: I was going to say, last week, we spoke to the team behind this new Brooklyn Museum exhibit, It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby. Hannah Gadsby talks a lot about the-- They call it the "Picasso machine," the money, that's gone around various exhibitions that's been put up by him, by them, by museums, by his state, I should say. The exhibit seeks to center Picasso and his work in the context of some of his misdeeds and his misogyny, and having feminist artists in response to Pablo Picasso. What do you think of efforts like this to recontextualize art and people this way?

Claire Dederer: Go ahead. I haven't seen the Picasso show at the Brooklyn Museum. Really, what I'm taking in about it is the internet perception of it, which goes to some of the core themes in my book that has to do with the way our experience is shaped by dialogue and by biography. That's what the internet runs on. I have not seen the Picasso show. I can't speak to that particular show.

Alison Stewart: What about the idea, the bigger picture, the idea of rethinking these ways, these issues, and using art to rethink them?

Claire Dederer: I think that the kind of impulse-- I have some misgivings or questions about the Picasso show again because I haven't seen it, but I do think that there is institutional responsibility to think about these problems that come up. For instance, if you're going to show a piece by Gauguin, are you going to just put the piece on the wall or are you going to allow yourself some biography to talk about the way that he moved through the world that he paints in this sexual colonialist way?

In my opinion, you can show the work and celebrate the work and share that information. The viewer or the reader or the listener is smart enough to take in both things, right? The institution can take that responsibility but still trust the viewer to get it, to appreciate the importance of the art, and consume this information at the same time.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Mendel calling in from West Hartford, Connecticut. Mendel, I hope I'm saying your name correctly.

Mendel: Yes, that's correct. It's Mendel.

Alison Stewart: Mendel, hi.

Mendel: Thank you for having me on the show, Alison, and hello, Claire. I think this is all really compelling. I was going to talk about Bill Cosby. While I was listening and it came up, I thought about the idea of, "What about guilt by association?" For instance, Roald Dahl was a known anti-Semite and Gene Wilder was in one of my top five favorite films of all time, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. He was not religious, but he did identify as Jewish.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. We were thinking about that. Thank you for calling. Another example recently has been-- Taylor Swift was seeing this artist, who has said some really racist things and acted out in questionable ways. Some fans were saying, "You can't do this," denouncing her for this. This Rolling Stone piece had an interesting line. It says, "For the last 17 years, we've held this woman responsible for the actions of men she chooses to spend time with, and it's time to stop."

Claire Dederer: I think that I want to go back to what Mendel was saying about Gene Wilder and Roald Dahl. I think that this speaks to-- and this goes with the Taylor Swift thing too. It's this quality of knowing too much is the issue. I'm 56. When I was a kid, I didn't know anything about the artist whose work I consume. Now, I can't help but know. We are constantly surrounded by biography. It's just like biography. It's falling on our head all the time.

I know about Taylor Swift's boyfriend. I don't even care about Taylor Swift. We know about this relationship between Roald Dahl and Gene Wilder. In a sense, it's for us to constantly be having to make these moral judgments based on this information. I think it's pushing us into a relationship with art that is less human. The art itself still deserves to be consumed and enjoyed without constantly being preoccupied with these biographical considerations.

Alison Stewart: Somebody called in. It was a follow-up I wanted to follow up on while you said that people keep bringing up Kanye West. Why do you think they keep bringing it up and what interests you about that Kanye West keeps coming up?

Claire Dederer: Kanye West hangs like a specter over this whole book. I think when I started writing, I was dealing more with this kind of way we were all having to wrestle with what seemed like his mental crisis and then the way that he turned that into art on Ye. I think that was the first biographical disruption. Then there were more and more of these disruptions that were racist. Then we came to the anti-Semitic stuff from the past year. I think that it's almost like his audience is a set of bowling pins and he's just knocking them all down.

If he doesn't do it this way, he's going to do it that way, and then he's going to do it another way. I think that he fills this role, this idea we have of somebody who's excessive and bad and at the whims of his impulses. I think these are all ideas that we have brought to the idea of genius over the last century. I think these are things that we expect, a role we expect genius to fill. In some ways, I see Kanye trying to fulfill that role by being so difficult. It's as almost as though the things that he's doing, he's trying to make himself as difficult as possible to prove that he's a genius.

Alison Stewart: You do have a whole chapter in the book about genius, about Picasso and Hemingway, and how sometimes the word "genius" is almost a hall pass. This could go on for a long time. We have a lot of calls. Was there anything that you wanted to discuss about this topic or say about this topic that you haven't been able to yet or hasn't come up in conversation that you think is important?

Claire Dederer: Yes, I think we've covered it. It really has to do with-- you can simultaneously say it's important for people to say when something bad has happened to them, which is the way I prefer to talk about cancellation. It's important that people be able to say when something bad has happened. It helps us be better. At the same time, our struggles with the work that we love and the art that we love, that has meaning and our love of the work also has value and both those things can be true.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma. It is by Claire Dederer. Claire, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for taking listeners' calls. Thanks to everyone who called in and tweeted and texted. Even the folks who didn't get on the air, we did read your comments and we appreciate you contributing to the conversation. Claire, thanks a lot.

Claire Dederer: Thank you so much and thanks to the listeners for all the great questions.

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