Separating The Art From The Artist

[Lady Winter Rose]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What motive?  It isn’t as though Walter Breen wasn’t a well known and unapologetic child molester who MZB married knowing what he advocated.

 

I didn't know that. Care to elaborate?

 

But motive I was talking about is that children didn't get any royalities, and accused the person who got them as "she knew".

The fact that it gone to charity, sound like they couldn't predict that. As far as I understand, all charity talk was initiated by other writers/foundation.

[Darth Richard II]

Yeah MZB was straight up a terrible person. not sure how that is even debatable.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Lady Winter Rose said:

 

I didn't know that. Care to elaborate?

 

But motive I was talking about is that children didn't get any royalities, and accused the person who got them as "she knew".

The fact that it gone to charity, sound like they couldn't predict that. As far as I understand, all charity talk was initiated by other writers/foundation.

Take a look at my links a page or so back.  Also this:

http://breendoggle.wikia.com/wiki/Walter_Breen

[Lady Winter Rose]

9 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Take a look at my links a page or so back.  Also this:

http://breendoggle.wikia.com/wiki/Walter_Breen

I didn't know that. Now I could never read anything by MZB.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 hours ago, Lady Winter Rose said:

I didn't know that. Now I could never read anything by MZB.

Yeah, it's pretty horrible.

[Yukle]

On 4/30/2018 at 7:59 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Take a look at my links a page or so back.  Also this:

http://breendoggle.wikia.com/wiki/Walter_Breen

Hmm... that's so gross I don't know what to write.

In cases such as these, you can't help but tie the art to the artist and despise all they ever created. And it seems his wife has since had accusations against her. I can't see how she can't have been complicit in his monstrous nature, either.

[Darth Richard II]

Well, I'm fairly certain all of the proceeds from her work go to charities now. It came up on another site. Not sure what charities though.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 hours ago, Yukle said:

Hmm... that's so gross I don't know what to write.

In cases such as these, you can't help but tie the art to the artist and despise all they ever created. And it seems his wife has since had accusations against her. I can't see how she can't have been complicit in his monstrous nature, either.

It is horrifying.

[Liver and Onions]

I admit, after reading MZB's book The Firebrand (I think that was the title, it was the one about Cassandra and the Trojan War) years ago, I didn't want to read another one of hers. Dear God, that book made today's grimdark stuff seem like an episode of Rainbow Brite. And it was the pointless kind of grim dark. 

I think the only stuff with her name on it that I ever liked were the Sword and Sorceress collections, and those were anthologies from other writers. 

 

[Mladen]

Given the current climate in Hollywood, this has become a burning question for me in the past several years. And I hope someone has the "right" answer, because, I swear to God, I don't have it. And the biggest issues I have are those that circumstances made difficult for me to judge:

1. "The Pianist" I have never watched any Polanski movie ever since, nor I plan to do so. The man deserves to be prosecuted, not allowed scot-free to roam Europe and film movies. I have watched this one at the age of 15 and it remains one of those movies that made the biggest impact on me regarding WW2. And as such, I can't simply allow myself to judge this movie based on its director.

2. "House of Cards" I know many people will quit watching this when the Season 6 airs thus sinking it faster than Titanic. What I hate is how it will remain the blemish and destroy Robin Wright's right to brag about one of the most interesting female roles of the last decade on TV. She, and many others who worked on that set deserved better. 

3. Woody Allen. If I said it once, I have said it 100 times. Who the hell knows what happened there. I most certainly don't. Dylan Farrow seems genuine in her claims, the public is inclined to believe her due to semi-incestuous relationship Allen has with Soon-Yi, the legal system didn't give us the necessary conclusion. The saddest fact remains that this has been left to each one of us to decide and that social media (with the good help of Dylan Farrow) became the playground for decision making. 

In all, I have no problem hating the people for their heinous behavior. But, when they destroy or taint something good for me, I have no idea how to process this. The last one being Weinstein, Judd, LOTR thing. 

[Toth]

Huh... this is certainly a difficult question. Well, actually it is not: I can't seperate Art from artist. I mean... I am not blind, if the artist has views I don't share, I tend to see them reflected in his works. As of yet I have not been ended up as a fan of a child molester, only the other way around, when a woman whose work I followed ended up raising her voice against someone whose work I always found disgusting even as a child. I guess that gives me the impression that I have a fairly good nose in regards to that.

Though admittedly, there is one case where I have ended up in a deep conflict with myself: Ryukshi07 and his visual novel series "Rose Guns Days".

Ryukishi is my favourite author ever. I adore his skills with unreliable narration, clever character-driven jigsaw plots full of mindscrews and gripping twists. I also know that he isn't perfect. Despite incorporating characters and plots that deal with outright feminist subjects like internalized misogyny, "nice guy"s or transgender issues he does conform to a degree to the male gaze like fanservice the entire industry is in the grip of (even though even there he often uses it to twist some tropes and defy the more egregious sexist undertones of other works). So I am aware that he isn't infallible even with his strong female characters. And I can live with that. I criticize it to hell and back, but my neverending awe about the complexity of his stuff doesn't let that drag me down.

And then I started reading the "Rose Guns Days" manga. And suddenly I decided to turn it down because I didn't want his ->possible<- political views to taint the picture. Because that story depicts a Nazi's worst nightmare come true... in a way that it justifies their fears that foreigners are out to destroy your 'culture'. It's a mafia story in a fictional post-WWII Japan where some unknown supernatural cataclysm has killed most Japanese and the society was overhauled by immigrants from the US and China who occupy the country. The protagonists, lowly blackmarket dealers, are portrayed as lovable idiots who defend Japanese traditions from the foreign influence... and expressing rather jarringly white-washed opinions of Imperial fucking Japan. Knowing Japan's warcrimes and knowing even today's climate of denying them, I feared a lot that my favourite author would side with his protagonists and claim that everything was awesome during the fascist era.

The weird thing is, everyone I asked who has read the story tried to encourage me to go on. Everyone claimed that at some point the protagonists will get confronted with facts and their openly nationalist worldview gets cracks. But... I would have liked some foreshadowing for that. Some hints early on that what the protagonists believe isn't fully supported by their surroundings. I begged those early chapters to give me something to decrease that anxiety that built up with every page.

In the end, I guess it turns out I'm weak. I put the story down and decided to never ever read it. I want to believe those other readers that there will be a twist that challenges the protagonists ideology. But up until then I couldn't stomach reading from the POV of characters whose antifactual white-washed view on the past was so deeply entrenched and natural that it didn't allow for the tiniest bit of a crack. Heck, if the readers are right, it might be an interesting ploy to lure readers with actual revisionist views into a sense of security to challenge their believes while they fear save. But for me the risk was too great that it was either written too clumsily or even as outright right-wing.

Well... it seems I am weak. I still refuse to read this work because I fear too much that it reveals something about the political believes of the author I don't want to hear. Instead I seal it in Schroedinger's catbox so that the possibility of him sharing my outlook on how to deal with the past remains unchallenged.

[Clueless Northman]

I like my friends despite their flaws. I'm critical enough and can have some standards and know well that, if I relied on that, I would eventually discard all my friendships because, for some reason or another, my friends are all unlikeable in some way. Doesn't mean I'd accept everything, you have to put the bar somewhere, and moderately high in real life.

When it comes to art, I don't feel the need to put the bar very high. As I just pointed to, if I put the bar high enough, I don't listen to any music, I don't read any book, I don't watch any movie/series.

I understand very well why some people can't enjoy anymore works by some artists - specially when you've been directly hurt or targetted by despicable behaviour similar to these artists', it can be nearly impossible to enjoy their creations. One thing that's totally reasonable and unobjectable, obviously, and that I might do at times, is what's already been mentioned: not buying stuff from a living artist you disprove or loathe, because that means pretty much giving money to that person. Apart from that, I still try to keep some distance between the artist and the work of art and might actually watch a movie for free on TV when I wouldn't pay to go watch it in theatre. Heck, even if I find Cruise quite dubious and wacko, if not worse, and had no interest in watching him playing, I eventually paid and watched Edge of Tomorrow, and however I might dislike him, found he did a pretty good job of it.

Now, what's probably the key reason why I don't stop listening to Wagner, can still read Alice or might watch (for free, mind you, as in on TV or when a friend lends me a DVD) a few Polanski movies, is that I'm deeply aware that we know how scummy these people were/are because it's fairly recent, but there are plenty of artists we don't know just how awful they can actually be (insert your random current celeb, say, Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Taylor Swift, Pope Francis, Dalai Lama or whoever you want), and even more importantly, there are millennia of artists we have no clue what they were like in real life - apart from a few, since for obvious reasons we know that Caesar the historian basically caused the deaths of a million people, or that Cicero the writer was quite insufferably arrogant and poseur. I mean, can we be sure Mozart wasn't a rapist, Rembrandt wasn't a child molester, Shakespeare wasn't a biggotted chauvinistic pig, Homer wasn't a murderer, and what about that unknow dude who wrote Beowulf? Odds are, most of ancient works of art were made by shady or unlikeable people - and some of their societies' and times' ideas were just abhorrent. Andeven if we had to assume that it's wrong to distinguish between writer and work since they're pushing their own ideas and worldview in their writings, it's still a fool's errand and a lost cause when it comes to the bulk of world literature, because for many (specially ancient) writers, we just don't know what ideas they have been pushing.

[DireWolfSpirit]

I mistrust much of the news I hear about celebrities and by extension artists, since reknowned artists are celebrities usually. I dont think a lot of the reporting can be trusted, even biographers accounts are often in dispute. It gets to the point where I filter out news about artists and am not comfortable with the voracity of a lot of it.

[Yukle]

On 5/8/2018 at 11:56 AM, Clueless Northman said:

...

When it comes to art, I don't feel the need to put the bar very high. As I just pointed to, if I put the bar high enough, I don't listen to any music, I don't read any book, I don't watch any movie/series.

I understand very well why some people can't enjoy anymore works by some artists - specially when you've been directly hurt or targetted by despicable behaviour similar to these artists', it can be nearly impossible to enjoy their creations. One thing that's totally reasonable and unobjectable, obviously, and that I might do at times, is what's already been mentioned: not buying stuff from a living artist you disprove or loathe, because that means pretty much giving money to that person. Apart from that, I still try to keep some distance between the artist and the work of art and might actually watch a movie for free on TV when I wouldn't pay to go watch it in theatre...

Now, what's probably the key reason why I don't stop listening to Wagner, can still read Alice or might watch (for free, mind you, as in on TV or when a friend lends me a DVD) a few Polanski movies, is that I'm deeply aware that we know how scummy these people were/are because it's fairly recent, but there are plenty of artists we don't know just how awful they can actually be... it's still a fool's errand and a lost cause when it comes to the bulk of world literature, because for many (specially ancient) writers, we just don't know what ideas they have been pushing.

There's not really anything wrong in assuming that people are fundamentally good until you have reason to believe otherwise. In many cases, the enduring legacy of an artist is because, over a long period of time, successive generations have decided to preserve what they did. It means that much of filtering has been done for us.

It's not a lost cause entirely, I think, and if we speak of recent trends, then I think it's a recent trend to assume all celebrities are arseholes behind closed doors. Think about it: how often do you watch someone with a friendly public persona with friends, only to have one comment that they're super fake, or that they're actually awful behind the scenes?

Our attitude of cynicism toward celebrity, not unfounded in principle, has had a side-effect of making us doubt that celebrities can be genuinely kind.

It doesn't mean that people were perfect, but it's also important not to think of historical cultures as monolithic. To use your example of Cicero, he doesn't compare to Taylor Swift. Swift is a woman essentially indistinguishable from most people in terms of her behaviours. If you were close friends with her, I doubt you'd find her more or less moral than your other friends. Celebrities have their positive attributes glorified and their negative ones vilified so that they seem extreme, but for the most part that's our perception and not the reality.

On the other hand, Cicero was a man who believed in inequality of people. Men as superior to women, rich over poor, the importance and natural good of slavery and other disgusting concepts. He lived in a culture that did not hold these are universal truths - indeed, much of his philosophy focuses on defending his views, which wouldn't be necessary if they were universally held.

To say nothing of the fact that if an artist is famous enough to have any following at all, at least something about them must be known to others. And whatever that is must be positive enough for others to share it. The thing about Polanski and Woody Allen is that much of their art was completed before anyone but their most intimate acquaintances knew of their abhorrent behaviours. Their art would never have flourished had that been known before they even made a film.

No one would have watched the Cosby Show if we saw the behind the scenes.

But overwhelmingly, most artists seem to live, make their art, and die and then we have no reason to ever doubt their standing as people. The ones who become sullied at times aren't representative of all of artists.

And I think learning of depraved behaviour does make us question if it's worth keeping their art afterwards.