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Daisy Dixon’s “Depraved” Grapples With the Art of Problematic Artists

In her book, aptly subtitled "The Story of Dangerous Art," she considers whether artists can ever effectively skewer the cultural signifiers that have defined them.

“Some artists are extraordinary, not just in their creative wisdom, but in their misdeeds,” writes Daisy Dixon in her book Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art, which hit shelves last month. The painting featured on the cover of the U.S. edition of her book is The Rape of Europa by Titian, which hangs in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. There’s a lot of overlap with Claire Dederer’s incredible book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma from 2024, but Dixon looks at art ranging from the “difficult pleasures” of Carolee Schneemann’s provocative performances to Paul Gauguin’s misogyny and othering gaze to Olafur Eliasson’s duplicity regarding a climate crisis statement that itself created ecological compromises.

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“If our art constantly represents historically oppressed groups of people as inferior, and in a way that tries to justify and glamorize this power dynamic, then this hierarchy secures a strong foothold,” Dixon points out. However, she immediately counters, “Critically rethinking our cultural landscape is not going to leave us with a barren, art-free world.” Dixon invokes Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis: “The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence,” refusing social amnesia over what she calls “artistic counterspeech” in the form of “intervention and the platforming of new narratives” to refashion the art world canon.

Observer spoke to the author over Zoom about some key controversial figures and how to deal with woke dismissiveness, her mixed feelings about Damien Hirst’s tiger shark piece The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, and whether artists can effectively skewer the cultural signifiers that they themselves have been defined by.

What was the imperative for you to write this book?

During my postdoc, I’d started thinking about if art can be speech, might it be a kind of oppressive speech? The #MeToo movement had happened, and this idea that not only might art be oppressive, the question of “can we separate the art from the artist” really came up when certain directors and powerful figures in cinema were being scrutinized because of their terrible behavior towards mostly women, and how that affected people’s reception of their films. After that, during the Black Lives Matter protests, [there was pushback] against oppressive monuments and civic spaces. There was something really quite radical about the amount happening all across the globe. It made me realize that the philosophical tools I’ve been developing since my Ph.D. were really well-placed to answer these quite complicated questions about how art can shape the world in a dangerous way, but also finding nuance in those tricky questions of “can you separate the art from the artist,” which were affecting people as consumers of art—affecting their behavior and putting pressure on their moral compasses [regarding] the art they can enjoy.

In the preface, you talk about those who feel “so-called woke culture trying to destroy their beloved art and tarnish their favorite artist.” Wokeness is a dismissive way to situate critical thinking, so how do you make progress with people who aren’t doing that?

I used to be quite naive, thinking, well, if we answer these questions using analytic philosophy, critical thinking, surely they’re going to think this is a very reasonable position. But it’s not had that reception. I have definitely already had pushback about the book, from that woke criticism standpoint. Coming from academia, I’m used to people disagreeing with me; I’m used to people criticizing me. Normally, it’s done in a very robust, careful way, and there is a risk sometimes that you can be in a bit of an echo chamber where you are........

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