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What should we do with the artistic legacy of people who commit immoral and illegal acts?

www.abc.net.au Picasso and Polanski committed horrific acts. What do we do with their art?

Post MeToo, audiences are reconsidering great artistic works in the light of their creators' transgressions. But is it truly possible to separate the art from the artist?

Picasso and Polanski committed horrific acts. What do we do with their art?

When the MeToo movement took off across the globe in 2017, it changed how we think about artists and their art.

As victims of sexual harassment and assault spoke out, the public became more aware of the behaviour of well-known people, including successful artists. Audiences immediately began to view these artists' work through the lens of their actions.

As a result, many of our favourite books, songs and art works became irrevocably tainted by the transgressions of their creators.

Admiring the work of Pablo Picasso — the cubist artist who burned his partner Françoise Gilot's face with a cigarette (and painted it) — or Alfred Hitchcock — the film director who tried to destroy actress Tippi Hedren's career when she rebuffed his advances — became a less straightforward proposition.

"In the aftermath [of MeToo], people were left wondering what to do about their heroes," US critic Claire Dederer writes in her new book, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma.

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33 comments

  • Now this is a good debate.

    Personally, my view is that it is inappropriate to hold people from past generations to modern value systems, as the rational basis of those modern values did not exist yet.

    We only expect human rights because we have ancestors that fought for them. Before the conflicts became commonplace, part of being a "good" person was to behave differently. We should not think that we are somehow special and would behave any differently than our ancestors, had we been nurtured in that time, surrounded by only those antiquated ideas.

    This is why Genghis Khan and Hitler should be seen in a different light. They were both butchers, but the Khan was a butcher in a time of butchers. Where Hitler did it in a time of industrialization and the rise of globalization. One of the men is a respected historical figure of great relevance, the other is despised as one of the most evil men in history. Not for different actions, though, but for doing the same actions in different contexts, in worlds of different expectations.

  • We should not make heroes. People are falible, don't idolize them. You can of course still admire their work.

    This is harder with artists though. They put more of themselves in their work and once you know an artist was an absolute cunt you can start seeing things in their art that you didn't before or experiencing it differently and don't like it anymore.

    But if you still enjoy their work I think that's fine too. Especially if they are dead and can't profit from it, if they would profit from it I, personally, just pirate it and that keeps my conscience clean.

    • But if you still enjoy their work I think that's fine too. Especially if they are dead and can't profit from it, if they would profit from it I, personally, just pirate it and that keeps my conscience clean.

      This is pretty close to something I've been saying for a while now in regards to the whole ActivisionBlizzard sexual misconduct thing any time someone brings up separating the art from the artist. You can easily do that with a book or a movie simply by going to a local library. And for many games through piracy like you said.

      For a live service game like World of Warcraft there is no real way to experience it without supporting them, either monetarily or in their precious monthly active users metric they switched to after they stopped reporting on subscriber counts. In that kind of case the only real option is to walk away.

    • I like this approach.

    • I wrote in another commenr:

      People with creative minds are more likely to push societal boundaries instead of just being happy in 9-5 jobs.

      You want to call out and cancel every artist that’s not the ideal person, enjoy your white walls for entertainment.

      • I'm not gonna downvote you (yet) because maybe I'm not getting your point right, and I think you didn't get mine which was the exact opposite to your third paragraph. I meant that no one's perfect, and when you idolize them you create expectation that no one can match so sooner or later they'll going to let you down.

        Now not being perfect or 'pushing societal boundaries', which many would argue is one of the purposes or even a requirement of art, is not the same as being a complete piece of shit. I'm not supporting with my hard earned money or with publicity anyone who I know is gonna use it to abuse others, or to scam, or rapists... but I hope these where not the kind of 'creative minds' you were talking about, are they?

    • I like your points. The only part I think that could still be debated is definition of an artist. Actors and singers are considered by many to be artists (though of course the definition of artist is subjective), and we are far more likely to recognize them in their art than we probably are to recognize, say, a painter or sculptor, thus making it harder not to idolize them as artists.

      But I still agree with you.

  • People love to see things and the world as black and white. In fairytales, the good people were always beautiful and flawless, and the bad people were always ugly and hateful. (Unless the story was deliberately about those stereotypes.)

    And we still expect the world to be like that.

    But it's not. People aren't even just good or bad. And even those "bad" people can do amazing things. Werner von Braun, a full-blown nazi, got us to the moon. Serial killers on death row have made scientific discoveries. Some eras and genres of music are barely anything else than drug trips where tons of people were hurt.

    That's just how it is. That book, song, movie you're enjoying, wasn't written by a flawless ethereal being. In fact, it probably wasn't, because people with creative minds are more likely to push societal boundaries instead of just being happy in 9-5 jobs.

    You want to call out and cancel every artist that's not the ideal person, enjoy your white walls for entertainment.

    Besides, before cancelling someone, you know how it works - throw the first stone...

    And also, whatever gets exposed is only the tip of the iceberg. Entire industries, creative or not, are built on suffering of some kind.

    If you decide to boycott someone or something, that's always your choice, but don't expect me to follow you, or be mad at me when I don't. Otherwise I'm gonna ask you what you plan to do with that phone built by child slaves.

  • The answer is pretty simple. Continue enjoying the art, but cut them off from any profits from it.

    • Where do you draw the line between cutting off profits and not? If somebody did only smaller crimes, do we cut only some profits?

      I don't get this reasoning. Either we can admit that people can do both good and bad things, and good and bad art, or we can keep doing all these cancellations until nobody has anything.

      Ed: also who gets those profits then, they corporations owning the IPs?

  • I'm not sure exactly who said it, but I like the phrase, "acknowledge the artist, appreciate the work."

  • You can't fully separate the art from the artists but you can try. The trick is to never learn about them in the first place.

    • This is a viewpoint I must disagree with. While it is possible to appreciate an artwork for its intrinsic value, knowing the type of life the artist led can often add to that appreciation. Or, in the case of some artists, an interesting discussion on human morality.

  • I'm on the humans-don't-have-free-will-train, so the way I see it, is you can still appreciate their art, even if it's just out of a morbid fascination that the brain-inputs which led to their crimes also produced their art.

    But you'll still want to hijack everyone else's non-free will, by socially punishing such artists, e.g. not giving them money and not expressing your appreciation publicly.
    This is especially important, if you've got artists actively using their artist reach to output horseshit, like JKR TERFing it up.

    • I’m on the humans-don’t-have-free-will-train

      Genuinely curious about this; could you explain that train of thought to me?

      • I can explain the idea, but I'll be honest, it took myself years of living in the dry world of maths, theoretical logic and computer science (+ likely autism) to truly get behind this one.

        So, you probably know from maths that a function has inputs and outputs. You stick parameters into it and then it evaluates to a result.
        With this model, the only way to change the output, is to change the inputs. A function cannot randomly decide that today, it's going to output something different.
        Well, it can, but then the date (or whatever makes that day special) needs to be an input to the function.

        There is no random, there's only pseudo-random, which is when it's really difficult to work out which inputs lead to a given output.

        And I don't see a reason why our brain should magically be different from this. Our whole brain is a function. It's an extremely complex function, with gazillions of inputs throughout our lifetimes.
        It's also not a pure function, as the outputs of future evaluations are influenced by the inputs of previous evaluations, a.k.a. we remember shit. And that remembering is fuzzy, too, as we only store certain statistical weights, like LLMs do.

        So, there are a ton of sources for pseudo-randomness, meaning even for toddlers (who've experienced comparatively few inputs), it can already seem random why they are crying.
        But I see no reason to believe that we've somehow acquired the only source of true randomness in the whole universe, let alone somehow a consciousness?/soul? which for whatever reason makes decisions not based on those inputs. That just sounds like terrible decision making to me.

        I feel like people struggle to let go of this idea of free will, because so much of our philosophy, religion, laws, motivation etc. are based on it. Even for me, with my particular set of brain-weightings, I have to be quite aware of my thinking to not fall into traditional patterns.
        Maybe the whole artificial intelligence shenanigans will make us realize that our own intelligence isn't that special.

  • I don't play Rolf Harris songs on the radio any more.

    I still play Michael Jackson on rare occasions though - no clear convictions I think, just accusations.

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