Is there an artist so horrible that no matter how hard you try that you cannot separate their art from them?
Similar to the recent question about artists where you can successfully separate them from their art. Are there any artists who did something so horrible, so despicable, that it has instantly invalidated all art that they have had any part in?
Kanye West. Maybe he was never 'all there' mentally to begin with, but the guy was clearly a role model to a lot of young people and utterly destroyed his own legacy.
I wouldn’t say the horribleness of a person is ever something that makes someone inseparable from their art. The art and the person just don’t necessitate each other. That said, I’m pretty sure someone might make a case for Nero, he burnt people on living candles and called it “art” and would lock people in concerts to hear him perform (if we assume the historical records are true). Relatedly, Saddam Hussein wrote a lot of fanfiction about defeating America with negative undertones that would make a Wattpad writer cringe.
This is actually a pretty big assumption for some of the more outlandish claims. When you dig in a bit, you find many of them are kind of repetitive tropes and generally come from Senatorial-class writers about emperors whose policies were less friendly to that class.
Not to say they couldn't have happened, and even in those days better to exaggerate than to invent from whole cloth, but it seems like an unusually large number of "bad" emperors had the same kinks as each other or the same traits that the literature had always considered "unmanly."
yeah kanye for me too. used to be my favorite artist, paid out the ass for tickets on multiple tours, knew all the words to his first like, six albums. haven’t listened to him in like a year and a half after the Alex Jones interview and Adidas stories came out. it’s not even virtue signaling, it’s just too much work to not think about all the horrible shit he’s done and said. i count myself extremely lucky that i never got a tattoo
Exactly, it’s laborious separating them. Even shit he’s just produced like Hov or Pusha T. My favorite songs come on shuffle in the car, vibin, 30 sec in… “oh shit… right… hmm… ugh… argghhh” next track
NGL If I were rich Id probably buy one of his paintings just to hang it in the least used guest barhroom.
Id never mention that it was a “Hitler” or why I had it. Id just like to have his failure be something my least favorite relatives have to stare at while they take a shit. My own personal fuck you to the cunt.
Reducing anything that anyone who venerates Hitler or Nazis to a joke is better than destroying it. Because its just a shitty painting, its not evil, it doesnt hold psychic power, its not a banner to rally behind. Its just a terrible mans terrible painting that is now something that hangs above Uncle Joe while he clogs the toilet with his mammoth fast food dumps.
Not as if I'm a fan, but Eric Gill is/was a prolific, respected and internationally renowned artist. You'll his work across the UK, perhaps most notably on the BBC's broadcasting house.
Also designed the Gill Sans typeface, which I think everyone's heard of or even used. Used all across the world on signage or stores.
Here's why I have a hard time taking his works at face value:
Although the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Gill as "the greatest artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a letter-cutter and type designer of genius", he is also a figure of considerable controversy following the revelations of his sexual abuse of two of his daughters and of his pet dog.
After hearing from Maria Schneider, and confirmed by Bertolucci, how he and Brando treated her filming the rape scenes in Last Tango my Brando crush instantly withered on the vine. She was only 19.
I never found anything he did appealing enough to even try to separate the art from the artist. He was always a dipshit. He used to call comedians like eddie murphy and told them that their act would shine a really bad light on black people.
Ian Watkins, lead singer of the band Lostprophets. Never read the court transcripts of his crimes, they really are that horrible and will ruin you for some time.
Generally all of them. Every time I consider this question about an artist, I try and consider if I was the victim in the crime. Would I be okay hearing, seeing, or listening to this any longer? If the answer is no, then it’s no for me.
I want to live empathetically and have to put my money where my mouth is.
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