Separating the Art from the Artist, and the Sticky Ethics of Consumption
Anyone who spends enough time engaging with media of any kind will eventually find themselves in an uncomfortable position: you become attached to a particular work or body of work, only to find that the driving force behind those works is a bad person. Either they hold beliefs that are too fundamentally at odds with your own to ignore, or they did something unforgivable, wielding the power and influence that fame has brought them to harm others, often in unspeakable ways.
For as relatable as this feeling is, it’s never a comfortable position to find oneself in, particularly given the outrage stemming from such news. The easy solution—and in many cases, the most ethical option with the best optics—would be to excise that artist and their work from your life, never to be heard from again. But that may not be easy, and frequently isn’t. After all, to both create art and to connect with it is a very personal thing, and some works will worm their ways too deeply into your soul to easily and conveniently leave behind. So how do you, as a consumer, deal with that?
The most oft-repeated refrain when this issue presents itself is that one must “separate the art from the artist.” While I understand the argument, it’s ultimately a weak and ineffective one to make. As stated earlier, making art is a very personal thing, and an artist’s work is deeply revealing, regardless of whether or not the artist in question intended it to be. Even a work that strives to be wholly impersonal remains personally revealing, as one’s decision to even attempt to create dispassionate and impersonal media is revealing in and of itself. What aesthetics and ideas you’re drawn to is indelibly and irrevocably linked to who you are as a person and how you came to be that way, and you don’t even need to be cognizant of such things for that to be the case. In simpler—if cornier—words, to make art and release it to the public is to share with that audience a piece of your soul.
In this sense, not only is separating the art from the artist a sisyphean endeavor, but an insecure one as well. It’s a line that exists to stop discourse, not further it. To say “you have to separate the art from the artist” everytime an acclaimed creative outs themselves as a massive piece of shit is, in essence, to beg your audience to please shut up. It’s a line of rhetoric that aims to unring the proverbial bell and to return to those halcyon days of thirty or forty seconds ago when you didn’t know that your fave was problematic. In other words, it’s a cowardly thing to say. Part of being an adult is learning how to face your personal discomfort head on and use it as a catalyst to hopefully become a better person than you were yesterday. Even beyond that notion, what’s the point—or indeed, the fun—of analyzing and consuming art if you refuse to acknowledge the personal idiosyncrasies of the people who made it? That includes their failings, and often their crimes.
That isn’t to say that every artist’s every crime is inextricably linked to their work; context is vitally important here, as it is in most cases. Richard Wagner’s antisemitism is too deeply linked with the nationalist sentiment that drove his creative ethos to seriously ignore, and any attempts to do so will inevitably leave you with a massive intellectual gap that will keep you from understanding his work as deeply as you might want to.
Carlo Gesualdo, by contrast, arguably committed a much worse crime than Wagner ever did, but his music has little if anything to do with murdering his wife. But even so, the darkness within Gesualdo’s soul that eventually led him to spill blood is the same darkness that led to him writing some of the most daring and idiosyncratic music of his generation. If you want to understand Gesualdo’s music from a philosophical perspective, you’re eventually going to have to confront who he was.
Having said that, I’m not entirely comfortable with many of the ways in which people respond to calls to separate the art from the artist. As I said earlier, it’s understandable why someone would want to try such a thing, and you’re fooling yourself and everyone around you if you pretend like it’s easy to let go of media that means a lot to you. Consumption is, as the title of this essay suggests, ethically tricky. For as much as art means to me personally, it’s a value-neutral phenomenon whose ethics are similarly neutral. Good people have always made bad art, and bad people have likewise always been capable of great art. It’s comforting to think that your ideological opponents are incapable of creating worthwhile media, but that’s as cowardly a notion as separating the art from the artist. Both ideas make consumption out to be something that’s both easier and more moral than it really is.
It doesn’t feel good for me to say that Claude Debussy wrote some of the most beautiful music of all time while also being super racist. It’s profoundly uncomfortable to rewatch a movie like Chinatown, knowing the crimes director Roman Polanski is guilty of, and how long the Hollywood establishment allowed him to continue making movies in spite of them. Does this make Debussy a bad composer, or Chinatown a bad movie? Of course not! It feels more ethical to attempt to leave behind all media made by problematic artists, but at a certain point, you’re going to find yourself face to face with a work you simply can’t let go of, no matter how hard you try. It’s an endeavor that will inevitably make you into a hypocrite, sooner or later.
As hard as it is to confront yourself with the knowledge that some of the people who made some of your favorite works of art were terrible people whose existence was probably a net negative for the world at large, it’s dishonest to pretend like there’s an easy way out of the ideological predicament.
Indeed, there’s a lot to be learned from facing this discomfort head on and understanding how a person’s flaws can inform and even enrich their work. Consumption is not, never has been, and never will be a moral act, but while you can’t separate an artist from their work, you can—and should—learn to celebrate a work of art and its successes without celebrating the failings of the people who made those works. It’s a less pithy line, and it fits less neatly into a tweet, but it’s the most responsible and honest means of consumption.