Edward Rothstein, the Wall Street Journal’s critic at large, reviews Daisy Dixon’s Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art — a Cardiff philosophy lecturer’s survey of works that are morally perverse rather than merely badly made. The review quickly becomes a fight over a genuinely hard question: can we judge the immorality of art across eras, or are we just imposing today’s pieties on the past?

Dixon’s book tries to categorize artistic offense:

  • Works that depict immoral scenarios — some pornography
  • Works that seduce viewers into evil — the Nazis’ 1940 propaganda film Jud Süß
  • Works carrying “dangerous messages” or hate speech — Confederate statues, statues of British imperialists
  • Works spoiled by their creator’s own violations — she argues Paul Gauguin was thus compromised

Dixon is torn between repulsion and fascination: she loves 1990s Norwegian black metal (“a powerful expression of emotional pain”), yet notes the scene inspired arson on at least 30 churches. She is unambiguous about the video game Rape Day (2019), and calls a lurid Mapplethorpe photograph “indisputably major” without explaining why.

The crux is Titian’s Rape of Europa (1562), which Dixon reads as rape propaganda commissioned by a king who identified with Zeus — a painting that tells us “‘No’ does not count as genuine refusal.” Rothstein’s counter: Titian’s contemporaries knew the myth as the founding of Europe itself, a Phoenician-Cretan union whose son was King Minos. Reducing those “resonant mysteries” to a modern conception of rape, he writes, turns the painting into a handbill.

  • Rothstein’s charge: a “rigid ethical grid” lowered over art, contemporary pieties used to judge the past
  • His sharpest analogy, from Dixon’s own book: 19th-century European travelers “left aghast” at Hindu and Jain sculpture, imposing their own categories on another culture
  • Dixon’s universal evils — genocide, slavery, rape, pedophilia, the structural injustices — versus Rothstein’s reminder that condemnation of slavery itself is historically recent

Neither side quite resolves it: Dixon calls for a “fearless reckoning with depraved art and artists,” while Rothstein concludes we are “left none the wiser.” The review is worth reading precisely because the disagreement is real — and the Indian-sculpture analogy quietly cuts against both presentism and Western categories at once.