Article by Anime Feminist: “How do you react when you find out one of the main creative forces behind something you love is, to not mince words, a completely shit person?”
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Am I that unique in not separating art from the artist? If I learn I creator has done some shitty things I don’t have a lot of difficulties just not consuming their content. There is always more amazing art to see so losing a couple creators once in a while is nothing.
Those artists are not my friends and I have no obligation to keep viewing their art.
More often than not, I can’t really do it either. If I am aware of a creator being a PoS, their creations will always be marred for me. So I rather move on than wasting my time on things I don’t really fully enjoy anymore.
If I stopped liking everything made by someone that was a douche to a significant degree, half of all music made in the last seventy years would be gone. A good ten + percent of literature would be. And movies would be right out the window because you can’t make a movie without a dozen or more people being involved in the core creation process, and there’s always going to be one douche in the mix.
Idgaf. Van gogh was a stalker, and he’s still one of the most amazing painters ever.
If I hate the living artist enough to not be willing to pay them for their work, that’s why living in the digital piracy era is so awesome. You don’t have to go hunt down remaindered books, you don’t have to dub tapes or whatever. I’m one of the rare writers that doesn’t object to piracy of my own stuff to begin with, so I have zero compunction about it for anything else.
While I agree that pirating stuff is A-okay under such circumstances, consuming certain stuff is - IMO - also sending a message to other people and that’s something I personally care about. YMMV
I think a lot of it depends on what ‘aspect’ of their person features most strongly in their work.
To pick a specific example: Ronald Dahl was a virulent anti-semite. And yet he was also clearly someone with a significant degree of empathy for children, after he himself suffered abuse at boarding school. His works come from this angle, seeking to provide children with the catharsis of seeing retributive justice done to evil adults. He also shows class conscience in books like “Danny, the champion of the world”.
I would argue that it is the ideas conveyed in a work that make it worthy, or unworthy, of consumption, rather than the author themselves.
As an aside, you may be interested in the works of the writer/philosopher Iris Murdoch, who does have something to say on this topic, around ‘can bad people produce good art’.
For me this has nothing to do with “good art”. I know perfectly well that horrible people can produce amazing artworks that shape the relevant artform for decades afterwards. Aesthetics, ability and morality are not co-related.
My point is this: Many people assume that consuming/appreciating the art of “problematic creators” is - on one hand - about the “goodness of their soul” and - on the other hand - about how creators benefit from the consumption of their art (that’s what the article is focussing on after all). But there is another layer and that is the message the consumer sends to the people around them.
Surely, in the case of Roald Dahl, nobody would assume that people would read Roald Dahl’s books because they approve of anti-semitism. If I see someone reading one of Dahl’s book, I do not assume they do so because they are an anti-semite.
But it’s an entirely different case in - let’s say - the case of the infamous black metal band Burzum. In that case everyone with even superficial knowledge of the band will assume that you are a neo-nazi, because the leader of the band is a neo-nazi who killed another black metal artist. Certainly, that is an extreme example, but it illustrates what I mean.
Even if someone is capable of separating art from artist, that does not mean that other people will do the same and therefore our choices will reflect on us, whether we want it or not.
just in response in particular to the “one bad apple…” line, the saying is “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel”, so I’m not sure that’s the analogy the author wants here.
personally, I think that basically every artist or creator ever has most likely had some or other sordid secret (or not so secret). with that in mind, separating art from artist becomes an absolute necessity. certainly their attitudes must influence their work in some way or other, but you aren’t required to accept every part of the whole, and just because a creative work has some questionable or downright disgusting elements doesn’t mean the whole must be entirely bereft of worth.
Of course, when it turns out that a living artist is a garbage person, you might feel more compelled to shun their creation as a moral statement or to deny profit to someone who plainly doesn’t deserve it. but literally “buying into” an author’s work is not the only way to consume it, and if you refuse to engage with them in a way that gives them unwarranted attention and/or plainly express disdain for their problematic attitudes, I think you can still be consuming ethically.
I feel a lot of the ‘separating the art from artist’, and by extension anyone claiming to be fighting ‘cancel culture’, is ignoring that the people trying to distance themselves from terrible creators and figures are not the ones behind their society’s own broken justice systems. Like blaming a victim of a crime for reporting the criminal and getting them jailed or fired and not their own government for the country’s terrible prison conditions or poor unemployment safety nets.
I’ve always been able to separate the artist from the work of art. I had to be able to if I was going to be a successful student. Now that I am middle aged I think my tendency is to read and watch things with complete ignorance about the creators’ biographical details. I don’t use Twitter or Mastodon. I don’t follow creators on any social media platform. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I did consume more media and payed attention to what creators say and do online. Maybe I would change my attitude. I don’t know. What I do know is that a work of art can convey a message that has absolutely nothing to do with the artist’s beliefs or political leanings. But then I remember attending a lecture that Gayatri Spivak gave at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory. She talked about how sometimes the politics of something, its “political value” if you will, can be much more important than what it is worth intellectually and people should go with that perception if that is what they ponder when contemplating a work of art (or literature, or any product of creativity). So, this is where subjectivity becomes important. Our subjectivity as we contemplate a work of art is important and if we feel we should disregard it because the artist is not to our liking, we might be better off rejecting it and doing something positive for the world and society. So, I guess my take is that I won’t mess with other people’s subjectivity and I hope they don’t mess with mine. On the contrary, we might be better off if we encourage each other to express our subjectivity and appreciate it for what it might mean in a social context.
