J.J. Charlesworth Reviews Daisy Dixon's 'Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art'

In a review for ArtReview's Summer 2026 issue, J.J. Charlesworth critiques Daisy Dixon's 'Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art' (Faber & Faber, £20 hardcover). Charlesworth argues the book rehashes a 'woke' position on which artworks should be deemed bad, attacking canonical Western artists for complicity in racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and social inequalities. Dixon opens and closes with the Marquis de Sade, whom she finds 'morally laudable' for subverting gender binaries, while hunting depravity in long-accepted works like Titian's 'The Rape of Europa' (1560–62), which she claims tells us 'sexual violence is alluring and erotic'. Charlesworth criticizes Dixon's theory that identical portraits differ in innocuousness based on the artist's biography (a loving sister vs. convicted paedophile Graham Ovenden), and her detection of latent proto-Nazism in Hitler's landscape paintings. He concludes that such social-justice art criticism erases the artwork's autonomy and denies the viewer's agency.