Ask Lemmy

To a certain degree, I'm a big fan of Hip Hop and Reggae and both genres are inescapably homophobic and misogynistic but I can look past most of the less than savoury parts, there's also a lot of glorifying violence in a lot of the music (though once you dig past a lot of the gangsta stuff it's much less common) but it doesn't bother me.

I can't listen to Afrika Bambaataa anymore though since the child sexual assault cases came to light, same goes for a lot of acts.

I also can't support anyone who is actively oppressing others like Jim Rowling or Graham Linehan despite how much I may have previously enjoyed their work.

to me yes. I can easily rewatch the harry potter movies. I just don't like wests music.

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.

"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

"Can you truly separate an artist from their art?"

Is much more a personal question of one's ability to overcome a challenge. It's much like "are you racist?"

I'd LIKE to think so, but then Woody Allen did this:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Whats-with-Baum/Woody-Allen/9798895652381

"A middle aged Jewish journalist turned novelist and playwright, consumed with anxiety about everything under the sun, Baum’s turgid philosophical books receive tepid reviews and his prestigious New York publisher has dropped him. His third marriage is on the rocks and he suspects his handsome and successful younger brother may have seduced his Harvard-educated wife. He is uneasy with her close relationship with her son, a more successful author than he, and suspicious of her closeness with their neighbor in Connecticut. And in a moment of irrationality, he has impulsively tried to kiss a pretty young journalist during an interview that she is about to go public with.

Is it any wonder Baum has started talking to himself? Strangers shake their heads and walk around him on the street. Meanwhile he learns a startling secret that could cause havoc should he expose it. Should he keep it to himself or reveal it and blow up his marriage?"

if you like Harry Potter or Kanye West, you are a baby idiot

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.

_ /\ _

Hitler's paintings weren't absolutely godawful and he should not have dropped out of art school. They weren't great paintings by any means but if he stuck with painting he could have blown his brains out in a bordello in Berlin instead of a bunker all blitzed up on benzedrine.