I think Rowling and West are both examples of where the person’s behavior later changed the way people interpret their art. That doesn’t happen for every piece of art. Like, Hitler made some really nice paintings of flowers. I loved almost everything I saw with Kevin Spacey in it.

Yes.

Liking this painting does not make you a Nazi.

It depends. Take Morrissey, for example. Do I have to hate the smiths because he’s developed some political views I disagree with? I’d argue no.

But then I’d also be suspicious of anyone enthusing about Hitler’s water colours…

Either you can or you cannot. It’s highly situational.

Michael Jackson’s music didn’t stop sounding good once I learned more about the person behind the songs, but I stopped eating Caesar salad dressing after I found out it contains anchovy. Maybe comparing a musician to salad dressing isn’t the best analogy, but the point is: in one case, more information changed my subjective experience of something, and in the other it didn’t. I didn’t choose that - it just happened, for no reason I can point to.

“Can you” as in “are you able to” or “should you”?

Anyway, yes on both counts personally. It’s like reviewing resumes with identifiers removed.

Otherwise, one would be judging the content with preconceived bias. IMO it’s a slippery slope to, and belong in the same subset as, so many other identity-related issues in society e.g. tribalism, identity-based politics, discriminition based on identities like race, etc

Yeah, but you shouldn’t be blind to it.

🙄

I’m tired of seeing this nonsensical argument too often on Lemmy so here it goes:

Ofc. I love some things about Kanye, the things that make his music just straight bops and his lyrics so fun and ridiculous at times, and I hate other things that are not related to his art. I know his weird anti-“Semitic” (Polish/Ukrainian people are not Semites but Anglo/Western cultures find any reason to hate other people, lol) rants are off-putting at the very least but I don’t know what that part of him has to do with “Flashing Lights” or “Guilt Trip”, they’re completely unrelated.

Now, when the art is a reflection/in praise of the artists’ ideology and takes, and those are morally and/or intellectually fucked, and you liked them, then that certainly says something negative about you. You can love or hate that one painting by Hitler and it would say nothing about you, but if you enjoy Mein Kampf you’re an immoral dummy, certainly.

Only you, yourself can that decide for yourself. People on every platform will throw their own opinions but at the end of the day, it is you who either enjoys whatever it is or not.

If the artist died a long time ago, absolutely. Lovecraft for example has been dead long enough that his horrible views can be looked past.

If they are still alive and causing problems, then not really. Fuck Rowling and Cosby.

Anything in between depends on what they did, whether they reformed, or if the art is completely separate from their behavior.

imo, Death of the Artist is a literal statement of the requirements to separate the two.

Sure, unless the artist is a tattoo artist and uses their own body as their canvas.

But as long as money is flowing to an artist who pulicizes what they will use that money for, your choice to give the artist that money is supporting the causes that artist supports.

Logically it’s pretty easy to demonstrate that you can. You could simply let someone experience a work of art, and never reveal any information about the creator. Boom, that person can experience the art completely independently of who the creator is, because they simply don’t have any information about the creator. In fact, that’s more or less how most people have experienced art for the majority of human history up until the past few generations.

Only when:

• The art isn’t significantly tied to the artist’s views/publicly spouted opinions/decisions/etc (e.g. if the artist is a Nazi, you can’t really separate an artwork they made with a swastika from the artist. If they painted a nice flower field 10 years ago, it’s hard to say that it is likely to carry any Nazi-adjacent themes, and is probably pretty distinct from whatever they’d make if they made art now)
• Consuming the art doesn’t financially support the artist (so in the case of J.K Rowling, you could pirate the books, or read a copy you already have, but you can’t buy new ones (or get them on loan from somewhere that could compensate her, like a library), pay to stream the movies, go to a theme park based on the work, or buy any licensed merchandise, assuming you want to not give her money and thus separate her from the work)
• Your consumption of the art won’t indirectly cause someone else to benefit the artist (e.g. you wear a shirt you already own with Harry Potter on it, and it reminds someone else of the series and they buy the books)

the obvious, surface level answer is that you can’t seperate supporting the art from the harm that the artist does. if you’re either forking over cash or simply doing free advertising by talking about ir, you’re supporting the artist and their ability to do harm. the end consequence of that idea is that you can ethically enjoy a bad person’s art if and only if you can source it for free and keep it entirely to yourself

i think there’s a deeper level to it, though. there’s a quote saying that “art holds a mirror up to nature,” and I think that’s half true. art isn’t a mirror image so much as it is an image seen through a prism, which naturally colors and distorts the image. if i remember correctly, Harry Potter doesn’t deal with gender transition or gender non-comfority at all, but it is an image of the world reflected through the lens of a cruel and bigoted person, and that manifests itself in other ways in the story (two obvious ones off the top of my head being the goblin bankers and the house elves). you can’t seperate art from artist because the artist shapes the art. the shape imposed by the artist is what makes art art and not merely information or a representation. none of this is to say that the mere act of reading harry potter is immoral, but what it is is dangerous. there’s no avoiding doing dangerous things in life sometimes, but trying to look at art in a vacuum is like driving a car with a blindfold. driving with your eyes on the road is a managble danger, an acceptable risk- driving blindfolded much less so!

Some things are more-fundamental:

the artist was expressing something that many know/understand/mean, & they were just the renderer of that meaning, in a recognizable way.

there’s a poem by Robert Frost which many people automatically recognize as him having experience induced understanding of depression.

many insist that that’s just projection, baseless…

but the problem is that if people who’ve experienced depression recognize that that-rendition honestly-does represent it well, & that is consistent, then the deniers are maintaining that there is “no basis” for that correlation.

Sometime’s it’s simply skill-of-artist: there was a writer who wrote about abused-children, & everybody who’d experienced it concluded that the author, too, had been abused, but that was mere-skill, & he found it frustrating that people woudn’t accept that…

but either can be.

Representing a meaning can be of-one’s-self, XOR can be of-one’s-skill, without any deep inner-recognition or experience-induced-meaning/understanding.

So, to the degree that meaning can stand on its own, yes, art can be separated from the artist.

But to the degree that art can’t stand on its own, because it is only expression-of-skill, or expression-of-someone/inner-meaning, it can’t.

& THAT is a spectrum, which different works occupy different locations on.

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