It's human to want to simplify a complicated situation. It's human to want to believe that people who are more ethical, or more attractive, must be more talented. From where I'm sitting, these are completely disconnected variables. (If there are studies correlating them, I'm unaware of them.) But when an artist people like turns out to be a bad person, it seems like it's easier to decide their art was bad all along than to accept the broader idea that terrible people can make excellent art.
Conflating everything about a person into a single "I like them" or "I don't like them" variable makes it harder to accept that a talented, attractive person who knows all the right gender words, can still be a bad person. It makes you more likely to, if someone made art you dislike, to look for reasons to believe that they're a bad person too. It makes it difficult to accept that a bad person can still do good things, or that a broadly good person (like you, perhaps) can do bad things.
@mogwai_poet
I often find that, when this kind of thing happens, the bad stuff is already baked into the art, whether people saw it or not. The example I always go to is Lovecraft. Doesn't matter as much if people are shocked by the name of his cat when you consider that he wrote many horror stories where the primary scary thing is mIxEd rAcE fOrEiGnErs oooOOOooo!!!! Same with JKR, if you look closely at any of the philosophy/politics/morals of the stories they always were utter, utter garbage.
@MrBehemo Yeah, and I think it's reasonable to take it a step further and say that a good (qualitatively or morally) work of art can have bad elements, and vice versa.
@mogwai_poet
Totally, and I agree with the idea that we should be critical of the art we enjoy, and can enjoy art we're critical of.
But I struggle with the other idea: "separate the art from the artist" because, how does that even work? Art is such a personal thing, the artist is all through it. And if it was even possible to make art and not put any personal expression into it, would even be art?
@MrBehemo Yeah, and everyone has a similarly personal relationship with the art they love. Whether to try to separate the art from the artist, and if so how to approach it, are deeply personal questions that you can't really answer for anyone but yourself.
the man is, objectively, an asshole. watch any interview, listen to his lyrics, he will tell you about it and how it fucks up his relationships
the music, objectively, slaps. Some of it, anyway. Blkkk Skkkn Head keeps showing up in movies and commercials, because it's very effective at pumping (clap) you up. (1/2)
@mogwai_poet@MrBehemo
He's also adopted a not-cappela sampling style that gives him some significant, like, historical contribution to the state of the art, whatever that may be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgJyhKEZ8QU
His work should be studied, it should be preserved, it is worth knowing about.
And he's a dickbag. He's rich but not rich enough, he votes for those guys, he's a loony on camera. Fuck him.
Somehow I live on thinking both these things. Not that art/ist is seperate, but yeah, "like" is too 1D.
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