Daisy Dixon’s new book asks an uncomfortable question: when does art become morally dangerous, and can it still matter as art?
In Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art, the Cardiff University assistant professor in philosophy argues that artworks can harm, oppress, and even function as forms of speech with real-world consequences. The book, published by Faber & Faber, draws on Dixon’s doctoral research, including a 2019 PhD thesis that proposed artworks can perform speech acts — a claim that once drew controversy, but is now gaining wider acceptance among philosophers.
Dixon says the project grew out of her academic work and has since expanded into a broader inquiry into what she now calls “aesthetic injustice,” or the ways aesthetic agency can be unfairly restricted. That framework gives the book its urgency. Rather than treating art and morality as separate domains, Dixon places them in direct contact, asking how a work can be aesthetically significant while still carrying moral damage.
Her examples are deliberately unsettling. She argues that Picasso’s and Gauguin’s works can be morally shaped by the lives of their creators without ceasing to be artistically important. She also points to racist ceramics from the Jim Crow era and the Western tradition of the female nude as examples of art that can participate in oppression. But Dixon is equally wary of censorship. Acknowledging that art can be harmful, she suggests, does not mean it should be destroyed or suppressed.
To organize the book’s argument, Dixon describes five distinct ways art can be depraved, comparing them to the heads of a Hydra: connected, but not reducible to one another. The image also reflects her skepticism about censorship, which she sees as a blunt instrument that often creates new problems rather than solving old ones.
The book’s most provocative claims come when Dixon turns to artists she considers especially morally compromised. She names Hitler as the most depraved artist discussed, noting the unsettling contrast between his seemingly tranquil watercolors and the worldview they reveal. She also devotes serious attention to the Marquis de Sade and The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), which she describes as morally abhorrent yet politically and philosophically revealing, especially in relation to the French Revolution.
For Dixon, that tension is the point. A work’s depravity, she argues, can sometimes be what makes it intellectually indispensable — a difficult but revealing record of what human beings are capable of imagining, excusing, and enduring.
