"Depraved": Daisy Dixon's sweep of taboo art lands at a moment when museums are renegotiating the past

A new survey of transgressive art has arrived at a precise inflection point. Daisy Dixon's Depraved, published on 2 July 2026 and reviewed in The Guardian on 1 July, walks readers from classical painting through the modern internet's most unsettling images — with stops at Goya, the Marquis de Sade, and contemporary video games — and asks why the works that unsettle us most often outlive the ones that flatter us. The book lands while Britain's museums are quietly rewriting the terms under which they decide what to acquire, what to keep on the wall, and what to send to storage.

The thesis Depraved advances, judging by the Guardian's reading of it, is straightforward and unfashionable: the taboo and the twisted have done real cultural work, and a public culture that refuses to look at them produces a thinner account of itself. That argument now competes with a generation of curatorial reform that has narrowed — or tried to narrow — the canon's tolerance for imagery made by, or depicting, the figures whose consent was never asked.

The book's argument, in plain terms

Dixon's method, as the Guardian review summarises it, is chronological and generous. She treats the Marquis de Sade's writing as a literary event with consequences beyond scandal; she treats Goya's late prints as documents of war rather than as decorations for the modern museum gift shop; she treats the video-game medium as a place where the same questions about harm, consent, and spectatorship that preoccupied earlier centuries have found a new and unusually candid venue. The book does not defend every image it describes. It insists that each one be read.

That is the proposition Depraved places at the centre of a public argument. A culture that declines to look, on the grounds that looking is itself a harm, ends up with a curatorial policy driven by anticipation of offence rather than by the harder labour of interpretation. The book's wager is that the harder labour is what museums are for.

What British museums are actually doing

The book is appearing in the middle of a quiet institutional reshuffle. The Guardian has documented, across 2025 and 2026, a wave of collections reviews at several major UK institutions — Tate, the V&A, the British Museum, and a number of regional galleries — in which the trigger has rarely been a single loan or acquisition. More often it has been a re-reading of provenance records, donor agreements, and the terms under which objects entered the collection decades ago. The pattern is consistent: an institution discovers, or is told by outside researchers, that the paperwork supporting a holding is thinner than it ought to be, and the work in question is quietly withdrawn while a longer conversation begins.

That conversation is not new. The Sarr–Savoy report's 2018 framework for the restitution of African heritage, commissioned by Emmanuel Macron, gave European museums a vocabulary that has since been adopted unevenly across the continent. What is new in 2026 is the speed. Restitution cases that would once have taken a decade are now moving in two or three years, and institutions are pre-emptively reviewing categories of holding rather than waiting for the next headline. Dixon's book arrives, in effect, into a sector that has just spent five years deciding which works it is willing to defend in public and which it would rather keep in storage.

The competing reading

There is an honest counter-argument to Depraved's premise, and the Guardian's review gestures at it. Some of the imagery Dixon catalogues was made by people who did real damage to other people, and a book that treats that imagery primarily as evidence of an artistic tradition can make the harm it depicts look like raw material. The same curatorial reform that has narrowed what museums will exhibit has, in many cases, been driven by the descendants of the people in those images, not by a desire to censor the canon. The reformist case is that institutions were too comfortable with the damage for too long, and that a working definition of "look away" is not an attack on art but a recognition of whose comfort the looking has historically served.

Depraved is on stronger ground when it reads the images than when it defends them. The book's own chronology — Sade, Goya, the twentieth-century avant-gardes, the internet — is the chronology of a public that kept changing its mind about what a viewer was allowed to see. The honest version of Dixon's argument is that this renegotiation is the tradition, not an interruption of it. A reader who comes away thinking the book is asking for permission to ignore that renegotiation is reading it badly; a reader who comes away thinking it is asking for a slower, more careful pace of renegotiation is reading it about right.

What it changes

The practical stakes are small but real. Depraved is unlikely to reverse any specific deaccessioning decision, and it is unlikely to put any withdrawn work back on a wall. What it can do is shift the vocabulary in which those decisions are described. An institution that withdraws an object because the paperwork is thin is doing one kind of work; an institution that withdraws it because the imagery has become indefensible in 2026 is doing a different kind. The book gives the second institution a way to defend itself without having to pretend the first kind of work is the whole story.

The larger question — whether a public museum in a democratic society should be in the business of making its visitors uncomfortable on purpose — is one that British institutions have been answering in practice, case by case, for the better part of a decade. Depraved is the first book of this cycle to address that question head-on, and it addresses it without pretending the question is easy.

What remains uncertain

The Guardian review does not specify how Depraved treats the contemporary video-game material at the back end of its chronology — a section that, on the evidence in the review, is described more briefly than the historical chapters. The book is also early in its reception cycle: the first major British newspaper notice does not constitute a settled critical position, and a survey of this scope will draw serious objections from readers who believe that the harm depicted in some of the imagery is not a defensible subject for a 400-page book. Both responses are predictable, and both are worth waiting for.

This publication's framing puts Depraved inside a live institutional argument — provenance, restitution, and the curatorial reform agenda — rather than treating it as a stand-alone publishing event. The Guardian's review is the lead source; the structural context is drawn from the same outlet's ongoing coverage of UK collections reviews and the European restitution framework.