Despite the delicious admission, “But of course Picasso was an asshole” (92), this book disappoints in ways I wasn’t expecting.

Dederer set out to do the work of articulating something that doesn’t come easily: addressing the ethical and emotional issue of consuming art created by monstrous men. But instead she assembles a tired apology for the shitty men whose “artistic genius”—a term as absurd as “auteur theory”— took over their better judgment and is the price we all pay for the creation of a so-called masterpiece.

There is something about Dederer’s language — the ease with which she critiques the use of the term genius, yet so readily wields it herself, and often, as if it were fact — that leaves me frustrated and aching for something other than an apology or justification for her own participation in maintaining patriarchal hegemony by lionizing already celebrated artists (worthy of the label “monster”) and disguising it as critique.

Arguments are meandering, wobbly, and self-absorbed, and eventually the book devolves into memoir and reveals an inability to comprehend women through a lens other than motherhood. It all culminates in a conclusion that completely falls apart and exposes Dederer as some kind of strange feminist monster-apologist who rails against cancel culture (in a desperately unexamined way), and posits we’re all monsters anyway, so why bother criticizing it? (Ugh.)