In her timely and punchy new book, the philosopher Daisy Dixon explores some of the most controversial artworks ever produced ... Come to Depraved expecting a conventional view of art history and you’ll be disappointed ... She believes depraved art isn’t something to be squirrelled away, but confronted 'loudly, angrily, beautifully': emotions that capture the spirit of this passionate book, which, like those rewritten labels in museums, is going to delight some, and prompt eyerolls in others.
The adjective depraved, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, occurs about 0.03 times every million words in modern written English ... Dixon makes an outstanding case for reviving the term in this compelling work ... Dixon’s range is impressive and enjoyably global ... Dixon, in this deeply impressive book, argues that art can help change the world. Let’s hope she’s right.
Daisy Dixon looks back over cultural history to argue that there is indeed such a thing as dangerous art, and it is measured by its degree of immorality ... Argues that art, in a slow and non-linear way, plays a part in shaping our morals and our points of view ... For the author, this is enough to complicate today’s standard liberal defence of art as something that is inherently good ... Such deconstructions pepper the book and show Dixon at her best. You feel the scales fall from your eyes ... Where Dixon is less convincing is her assertion that art can be understood as a kind of 'speech'.
Though its title suggests that it might be about extreme artworks at the margins of morality, this book turns out to be a rehash of the ‘woke’ position on which kinds of artworks should be deemed bad ... Depraved reveals the basic trouble of social-justice art criticism: the insistence on indicting the artist’s intention ends up erasing the artwork’s autonomy ... It also denies the viewer’s own agency: to judge for themselves, to appreciate the work on their own terms, while taking or leaving the history that made it, regardless of progressive puritans like Dixon.
Art that depicts rape, slaughter, and problematic historical figures should be criticized but not necessarily censored, according to this probing debut treatise ... Dixon insists that concerns about morality and justice are important without losing sight of art’s aesthetic imperatives, and she writes incisively about the interplay between the two. The result is an insightful, timely analysis that gives full weight to both art and conscience.
Whatever one’s 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 ... A nuanced, impassioned treatise on depraved art and its creators.
