REVIEWS
Separating art and strife
There was a time in my life when I considered Annie Hall to be my favourite film. For obvious reasons, that isn’t something that I readily admit now. In the wake of #MeToo, we find ourselves asking again and again what exactly are we meant to do with the art of bad people? If I sit down and watch, say, Rosemary’s Baby, does that mean I am forgiving Roman Polanski for his crimes against a young girl? How do we morally traverse a cultural landscape that has been so deeply stained by the reprehensible actions of others?
This is the question that Claire Dederer seeks to answer in her essay collection. Beginning with Polanski and working her way through a rogue’s gallery of problematic artists (Woody Allen, JK Rowling and Pablo Picasso are some of the obvious names; Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell and Virginia Woolf, less obvious). Dederer considers the two diverging roads that many of us have had to face in recent years: do
