“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.
“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 somewhat preaching to the choir. In this case, this book is dividing people. The “woke” criticism is an objection to rethinking and radically disarming through ethical curation and community-led activism. I’m not even saying we should censor immoral works—but that doesn’t seem to appease people, because they think if you’re making a woke criticism of art, that you’re for censorship. My book is generally quite anti-censorship. There are going to be some cases where censorship may well be called for—I actually say that the ethics of censorship depends on the ethics of the artwork—but I do caution against it. We have to be very, very careful with it as a method to deal with immoral art.
I don’t want to abandon that attempt to try and persuade people who dismiss these criticisms as woke. I still believe we can change some people’s minds and maybe this book, among many, [provides] ways, if these people just engage with what we’re actually saying.
Is the pushback online or at events?
I think the people who are coming to events have been entirely amenable to the idea. They’ve changed their minds about some of the artworks I look at. Some people were like, okay, we do need to perhaps relook at these canonical masterpieces. There was one review by an art critic that was very, very short, and it just accuses the book of being a rehash of the woke position. Otherwise, it’s just lots of people online, negative comments on X and Facebook.
A lot of the artworks I discuss are artworks by pedophiles and erotic literature that romanticizes and eroticizes sexual violence against children. I’d like to think we can agree that these are dangerous artworks and they are objectively immoral. Then I had these accusations of being woke, and I’m like, “Oh, this is kind of frightening. Like, what?” We need to be able to point out true depravity and where our society is going when it romanticizes or glamorizes sexual violence. This particular critic agrees that the Marquis De Sade’s literature is immoral, but there seems to be a resistance when we talk about art that is racist or art that is sexist towards women—that’s more where the woke objection comes in.
Which reveals misogyny and racism are very… commonplace.
Indeed. I naively thought when I was writing the book that we’d all be on the same page. But maybe we’re still not, as a society.
Definitely not. The political climate reflects ideals that are extremely polarized, and that people are not in agreement at all. There’s no unity; there isn’t even a bridge.
Exactly, and I think the political spectrum is always intimately bound up with moral compasses and the moral landscape. And part of the wokeism objection also gets tied up with the moral relativism charge. “Oh, you shouldn’t be judging these past artworks by today’s standards,” as if today’s standards are a different moral toolkit to what they were before. I’m pretty sure women during the Italian Renaissance didn’t think sexual violence was okay. We might not have had the concepts or the words for it, but morality isn’t entirely contained in each society. There are certain moral facts that I think transcend a particular societal place and time.
You cite Simone De Beauvoir not sanctioning the ideas by Marquis de Sade but sanctioning his revolutionary spirit of breaking taboos. Can you talk about that ambivalence: how do push back on ideas, but see them as groundbreaking in a conceptual way?
With Simone de Beauvoir, she disagreed with the cruel ethics of the Marquis de Sade’s writing. In many of his novels, there’s extreme sexual violation, often involving children, often involving women as well. There’s a lot of rape, and these novels are not just depicting these things: they’re expressing immoral perspectives and inviting the reader to derive pleasure from this violation. Simone de Beauvoir’s position is correctly nuanced because, on the one hand, she’s saying this is objectively an immoral work of art, but she—as an existentialist in the 1950s—saw this 18th century work as having historical value, the way it is set within the French Revolution.
A lot of people think that 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade should be interpreted as a satire or a critique against the church and state, against the elite classes. It was pointing out the hypocrisies of these corrupt higher rungs of society and the destruction and exploitation of the lower classes. But Sade himself was an aristocrat, so he was living and breathing sexual liberty and extreme freedom. So it’s not a straightforward interpretation.
But Simone de Beauvoir, as well as seeing historical value in it, saw philosophical value, because Sade was an atheist and he adopted a nihilistic moral system. He didn’t think there was such a thing as right and wrong. There was just pleasure and pain, and we should be libertines. We should pursue extreme pleasure at the cost of everything, even the destruction of other people. And whilst Simone de Beauvoir might not have thought that we should live as libertines, she was interested in how we make meaning in a godless world, and how we define ourselves, and what freedom even looks like—if and what free will would look like if we don’t have a kind of divine being that’s designed or fixed our path as human beings.
Even in the most sickening art, in these taboos, you can find political and moral value in them. There’s a way of holding that nuance in both hands, which I think is what Beauvoir was trying to do.
You use Damien Hirst’s tiger shark piece, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, as an example of uncomfortable yet effective art—and how watching David Attenborough documentaries doesn’t hit as hard as seeing Hirst’s work. The things that are problematic can also be the ones that are the most effective or penetrative in terms of having us rethink things. Can you expand on that?
This idea that art can be immoral because its very process or production or material is unethical… there are different ways that that can happen. Even artworks that are about the climate crisis have themselves incurred a carbon footprint. There’s awkward irony. With the animal pieces, I wrote about those also from a perspective as a failed vegan; I now eat meat for various reasons. So I’m already a flawed or complicated moral agent who’s interacting with these works that have involved killing these animals purely for the art.
Damien Hirst’s piece from the ’90s involved killing a real shark purely for the artwork. He has his own fisherman, who apparently has a few sharks on ice because various other sculptures of Hirst’s have decayed or not been preserved well enough. The shark piece has been replaced at least once with another tiger shark caught off the coast in Australia. I’m a huge shark fan. They’re my favorite animal, and I was really determined to hate that shark piece. But I had the honor—really, I think it is an honor—to see it in the flesh in New York on an art trip when I was like 20 years old, and it just really took my breath away. I think the emotional impact and power that that work has comes from the fact that it’s a real shark. You’re literally staring death in the face. Hirst himself is a controversial figure when it comes to animal ethics: his whole oeuvre has involved killing like a million animals, or something crazy like that. So in that sense, this artwork is morally flawed.
But in a weird way, that very moral flaw is what explains its huge impact on people. The ready-made wasn’t new, obviously, when Hirst was doing it, but he did transform the history of art with those pieces, whether we like them or not. From my point of view, it was rich with meaning about the sublime: about the ocean, our respect and awe for it, but also the destruction of the ocean, our overfishing. As an artwork, what it’s saying and doing is almost infinite. But it can do that whilst being flawed.
I just wonder whether it would have had that same effect if it hadn’t been a real shark. I don’t think so. And it’s nothing against David Attenborough. I think his documentaries are obviously incredible, and they get that ethical climate crisis message across well. But it’s quite gentle still: it tugs on your heartstrings a little bit. There’s something about seeing the shark that just is horrifying in a way that the documentaries perhaps weren’t doing quite enough.
You write that there’s a different kind of provocation with artists who are skewering an identity that defines them, doing it “from the inside.” You cite Andres Serrano and Chris Ofili as these two Catholic artists who made very controversial works that had Christian iconographies…
Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ, where the plastic crucifix emerged in his urine in a photograph, provoked so much backlash—people just tried to destroy it. He had funding withdrawn. He received death threats. When it transpired, his own intention for the piece was to show Christ in the realism of the crucifixion. He says the piss and the shit would have come out of him: he’s humanizing Jesus as this real man. And whilst people found it incredibly offensive, blasphemous, I do think that was not an extreme intention. I don’t think an artwork can only mean what the artist intended it to mean, but I do think their background is really important to understanding what the artwork might be saying. I think it can—it should—influence our interpretation of the piece.
Chris Ofili as well… this depiction of the Black Madonna using elephant dung and pornographic collage. I do think when we take into account the artist’s background, that should make us pause to rethink what that artwork is about.
You talk about Hitler when exploring the background of an artist, that none of the violence of his ideas is tangible in his work… it’s this weird absence of provocation by an irredeemable monster. Can you elaborate on how knowing the background of someone can be informative?
That’s a really nice link with the Serrano and Ofili pieces, which might have looked really shocking and disgusting, but were actually made with good faith. It’s the same kind of lesson I drew with Hitler, but in the opposite direction: his paintings have for a long time been dismissed as really crap, and irrelevant to Hitler’s personality and his atrocities that he committed. Art is almost a funny side fact: “Oh, maybe if he got into art school, maybe he wouldn’t have become the most barbaric person possibly in history.”
But in the book, I take seriously what art historians say about Hitler’s watercolors and oils. He painted hundreds throughout his entire life. He started very young, but particularly by the First World War, when he was in the trenches, his anti-Semitic beliefs really started to develop. When he couldn’t get into art school, he blamed Jewish people for it because he thought of Jewish people as having control over the art market. But his actual paintings are very peaceful, ranging from traditional architecture in Austrian and German streets, a lot of landscapes, mountains, lakes, forests and bouquets of flowers. There’s nothing explicit there that we can say about his moral character that is seemingly relevant to the paintings.
But in the book, I explore how his style of art making is really relevant because he thought art should be idealistic and depict romantic things. And his actual own taste in art really defined the art of the Third Reich, which by that point was very similar in style: realistic paintings of ideal bodies. This is where the Aryan myth-making was really falling as an aesthetic, and they of course denounced so-called “degenerate arts” made by not just Jewish artists but also art that was non-representational. Hitler’s style of art making was influenced by classicism and neoclassicism and the Italian and German Renaissance, and that aesthetic was, even before the First World War, very much tied up in Aryan myth making. I think Hitler’s paintings are probably one of the most insidious works of art I look at because of his artistic taste and what he thought art should be.