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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday

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Start the Week: Monster artist/monstrous art?

Monster artist/monstrous art?

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Monster artist/monstrous art?

Tom Sutcliffe with Claire Dederer, Devika Ponnambalam and Michael Bond.

Claire Dederer, Devika Ponnambalam and Michael Bond discuss the dilemma of fans faced with badly-behaved artists, with Tom Sutcliffe

What to do with the art of monstrous men? That’s the question Claire Dederer grapples with in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. She wonders whether she can or should continue to love the work of Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, Hemingway and Picasso? And if it’s possible to divorce the art from the artist.

How do we now view the glorious, technicolour paintings of Paul Gauguin’s works from Tahiti? The writer Devika Ponnambalam has imagined the life of one of his muses Teha’amana in her latest novel, I Am Not Your Eve. Gauguin was 43 when he first arrived on the island in 1891 and made numerous teenage girls his ‘unofficial wives’.

The science writer Michael Bond is interested in the psychology behind fandom. In his book Fans he looks at the pleasure of tribalism and sense of belonging, but also what happens when one’s hero falls short, and the cognitive dissonance needed to continue to stay true to a monstrous genius.

Producer: Katy Hickman

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