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?
Imagine someone telling you “you have to separate the product from the corporation. Yes, they lobby to permit slave labour and are directly funding the genocide in Palestine, but they make one fine chicken sandwich - and if you don’t put down your silly objections to focus on that, you have failed as a human being”.
Fuck that, fuck everything about that.
Art is political. Fiction doubly so. You cannot and should not try to rip art free from its cultural context, because that context is the perspective that gives it meaning in the first place.
And extra-splintery fuck the idea that the onus is on the audience to sweep everything under the carpet for horrible people.
We’re in no danger of running out of art. We have an unlimited supply of artists just waiting for a break in the canopy to sprout up and grow into something new and exciting. If a handful of toxic assholes get canceled despite being popular, then so much the better.
I disagree. You can both admit that the company makes one damn fine chicken sandwich and still not buy it because they support slave labour. Them supporting slave labour doesn’t make it a bad chicken sandwich, just as them making a damn good chicken sandwich doesn’t stop them from supporting slave labour. It’s the method that’s important, not the reason itself.
That's the point though, that some people will use the 'but chicken sandwich is good' as a justification to overlook the other problems and still buy them. My ex and Hobby Lobby, for instance - she'd want to go there and shop for paints because they 'might have a sale', and I was just uh, no? Fuck Hobby Lobby.
First up, fandom is free advertising; fuck them I’m not promoting their product for them, even if I don’t buy it.
But more than that, it’s sending a message that the behaviour is something we’re willing to condone, that we stand with the abuser rather than their victims.
Imagine telling a sexual assault survivor to just lie back and enjoy the masterful comic stylings of Bill Cosby, or at least to shut up and let you enjoy it, because they’re ruining the funny.
Would that person have reason to consider you a friend or ally after that?
The Harry Potter IP, for instance, is just a giant anti-trans flag now, and the people who wave it around are picking a side. They can’t pretend they’re not; pinning the logo to their chest is explicitly endorsing the author’s views, and spitting in the face of every trans person in their life.
I think you missed their point. They explicitly said that you can at something is a good product and just not buy it because fuck that company. Same point with artists, they can be talented shitbags, we avoid them for the shitbag part, no other reason.
Every work has the author’s stank all over it, it can’t not. It’s seen through their eyes and spoken through their lips (or fingers I guess).
Once you know what it is, it will - and should - colour your perception. If it turns out to be something toxic, then you’re allowed to be viscerally repelled by it. It’s okay. It’s not intellectual dishonesty to have an emotional-based opinion on art ffs.
Now if you let your opinions on engineering get affected by emotion, that’d be another matter. When deciding whether a bridge is safe to carry traffic, you absolutely should not let your personal feelings about the architect factor into the decision.
But this is art we’re talking about. Entertainment. Works designed specifically for emotional impact, with no value outside of that. How you feel about them is the only valid criterion.
If a work squicks you out because the author is a piece of shit, that’s a genuine, valid and authentic opinion - it’s pretending otherwise that would be dishonest.
And in my experience, the ones shouting the loudest about the intellectual integrity angle tend to be fanbois with a huge emotional attachment to the work from their adolescence. Buncha simps, in other words.
Which fine, feelings are valid - but they should damn well own it. If nostalgia > victims, then have the balls to just say it, don’t try to well-ackchewally it into some lofty principle, because it isn’t.
I am a fat guy, there sandwich is only marginally better than the lowest end stuff, any fast casual local place is going to do it better. You can trust a fat man about fried meat.
Right except we can’t apply this evenly. You can go right now to any big museum, see elegant wood carvings from like 800 years ago, and we know nothing about the artist except his name. How do you know he wasn’t a murdering psychopath? You don’t. What you do know is Rowling said some shit on Twitter. We are holding more modern work to a higher standard compared to older work simply because we can document the lives of modern artists better. If you can’t enforce a moral principle with anything resembling consistent application I question how good it is.
A good moral principle is ‘don’t do things that needlessly harm people’, but unintended consequences are everywhere. By delaying a passerby two seconds while you give a homeless guy $5, you might end up causing them to get hit by a garbage truck that would otherwise have missed them.
You can’t enforce the principle consistently, but that doesn’t make it worthless; you give it a good-faith, best-effort go, and that’s all you can do. If your best efforts turn out to be disastrous, that’s shitty, but life’s unfair like that.
Also, whatever else was going on with the person 800 years ago, JK is right now causing ongoing harm in her relentless campaign of hatred for trans people. Waving her IP around is promoting her cause, and so harming more people, right now.
If nobody knows whether the 800-years-ago guy was a piece of shit or not, then promoting their work isn’t supporting some piece-of-shit cause and harming people.
As for chicken sandwiches - without explaining why you think my analogy was inapt, calling it bullshit is no more of a slam-dunk rebuttal than if I called you a poopoohead.
Entity X makes product Y and does shitty horrible thing Z. By being a product-Y fanboi and promoting Y all over the internet, you’re expressing approval for X and condoning Z (at least enough to cut them slack for it).
What difference does it make whether Y is a media IP or a food product?
Don’t muddy the water: you were talking specifically about chick-fil-A, even though I was using it as a generic example of a product people might get attached to. The ‘separate the art from the artist’ crowd would have you ignore any unpleasantness on the part of the producer, so long as the product is enjoyable in isolation - and hold it a moral failing not to do so.
And your entire point was that you couldn’t be consistent because you werne’t all-knowing; not knowing the character of your 800-year-old artist is no different in this instance from not knowing the future: to perfectly apply the principle would require full knowledge of every situation where it could possibly apply (which is of course impossible). This does not, I contend, render the principle, or attempts to apply it as consistently as your knowledge allows, worthless.
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."
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.
Same. Guy gives me the creeps. As do far too many others from Jack Nicholson to James Franco (not sure why those came to mind first, and I was going to continue listing, but honestly there are just too many, some, like Russel Brand it was obvious way before any public allegations were made, so there are those as well, where we're just waiting for the other shoe to drop. There are also those who I can't stand seeing/hearing because they're bigots, so I really could be here all day).
I'm not claiming any purity by the way, there are far too many to flat out avoid them all, but some simply make my skin crawl more than others, and I just don't need to consume something that makes me feel that way. ¯*(ツ)*/¯
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.
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