Can we enjoy the work of morally “tainted” artists?
Should we still engage with great work if its creator is a monster?
Throughout history, it’s no secret that morally “tainted” people have discovered, created, and advocated for incredibly good things. And it’s not just artists: Thomas Jefferson owned over 600 slaves in his lifetime, despite giving lip service toward ending the practice. William Boeing, founder of the eponymous aircraft company, was a white supremacist, only allowing non-whites to occupy land on his property if they were employed as domestic servants by white people.
But, certainly, artists of all creeds, too: Weinstein, Spacey, Franco, Slater. Chuck Close, Chris Brown, Morgan Freeman, R. Kelly, Richard Meier. Picasso was merely, and only possibly, an acute misogynist and abusive father; but also “one of the greatest artists that ever lived”. And the list goes on.
But that was all last century. Or the century before that. It seemed to take #MeToo to resurface one of the biggest moral questions in history:
Can we separate artists from their work?
It’s a good question, and a necessary one because of its moral implications. (Of course, a lot’s already been written about it, like this, this, and this.)
But from an ethical standpoint, which is undoubtedly the unwritten reason for asking the question in the first place, we also need to ask (and answer) a few other important questions. After all, the important thing isn’t just if we can separate art from artist; it’s whether or not not being able to separate them means we as viewers are also morally in the wrong if we engage with the work. We must decide whether it’s wrong to watch a Weinstein or Polanski film, and if we should listen to XXXTentacion or laugh with Louis C.K.
And on the flip side, if we are able to separate art from artist, the question becomes how exactly we do that without somehow rewarding the artist or ignoring the victims’ claims. In concrete terms: is it OK to laud a pedophile rapist who also happened to give us The Pianist?
It’s hard. Engaging with great art isn’t just about walking into a museum and reading a caption. Art is a thing that touches our soul by way of our hearts, and to admit that we possibly shouldn’t engage with a tainted artist’s work anymore means that a piece of our soul may be left to wither, too.
Hmmm. So let’s start at the top.
Art and artist: inextricably linked…or not?
The first question we must answer is if we can separate the art from the artist. If we can, then some may claim there’s simply no moral conundrum: art and artist are separate entities, so no matter what the artist has done, the art is untainted, we’re free to enjoy. But I don’t buy it.
My simple answer — and I’ll pull out my art historian card now — is no: we can’t separate the art from the artist.
So much of what we (art historians) do is try to understand the time, place, and artist behind the work, in order to better understand the work itself. The artist brings his or her whole person — life experiences, emotions, way of seeing and understanding the world, time and place of existence — to what he or she creates. True, most people are not art historians, and take popular works of art at face value. But my point is that regardless of what’s created, the fact that those who study the art take the creator as a necessary part of the equation; the art would not have been created in that way if not for who and how and the artist was. The art and artist are inextricably linked, regardless of if each viewer knows anything about the artist.
Here’s an example:
Michelangelo, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the year 1512. Is it an incredible work of art? You’d probably say yes. What do you know about Michelangelo? I’ll guess not much. (It’s okay: I don’t know much about him either.) But it doesn’t matter.
Now imagine someone came along and painted the Sistine Chapel exactly as Michelangelo did — but had done it, say, last year. I can pretty safely argue that you and I both wouldn’t think of it as a great work of art at all. It would be beautiful, and worthy of checking out, but probably more for its holy context than anything else.
Michelangelo’s accomplishment in the Sistine Chapel was bigger than its beauty, though. It was also about the work’s influence on other artists at the time and since, for its technical feat (Michelangelo designed a special scaffold to hang from the ceiling instead of using one built up from the ground), for the fact that Michelangelo wasn’t even a painter but a sculptor. According to my friend Wikipedia, “many writers consider that Michelangelo had the intellect, the Biblical knowledge, and the powers of invention to have devised the scheme himself” — a combination of powers specific to the artist himself.
And the scenes depicted? Straight outta the life of Michelangelo, from self-portraiture to the tension between his “homosexual desires and passionate Christian beliefs.” Certainly, this is an exceptional example of greatness in a work of art, but I’d still argue that any great work of art is inseparable from its artist; it’s in fact part of what makes it great.
(And on the flip side, I think this is one of the biggest reasons we have trouble with assessing contemporary art, especially when it comes to younger, “emerging” artists: there is no telescopic lens with which to see the artist in context.)
Flawed artist, flawed art?
So OK, great, you’re still with me: we assume the art and artist are necessarily linked. Then what happens when a work is officially great, but the artist is majorly flawed? Or is even a “monster”, as some writers have asked in the past? We’re left with the big question: is it morally wrong to engage with their creations?
There are two ways to look at this, and we have to examine both.
On one hand, we can look at the relationship we as viewers have with the artwork in question. Does it taint us by some weird moral osmosis, and then by extension we carry that moral taintedness further into the world — is that the major concern?
Or, on the other hand, is the important thing whether or not we’re rewarding the artist through our engagement with his work? (At this point I’ll stop using “or her” here, since potentially-controversially-but-empirically it’s most often men doing the moral transgressing.)
The first question is about how we are morally affected as viewers, while the second is a question of how we are morally affecting.
The objective difference…
The first question — how a tainted artist’s work may stain us as viewers — asks us to look at relationships between artist, art, and viewer. While I’ve already argued that the artist and artwork are inextricably linked, I haven’t commented on their relative moral statuses. Just because an artist is a monster and is inextricably linked to his work, does that mean his work is definitely tainted, too?
Maybe it’s weird, but I can’t help but think of babies. Are babies of bad people also bad, simply because they are of that bad person? Not necessarily…but maybe, and sometimes. It depends on the baby, and it depends on the parent, but it also depends on everything else. The difference between babies and art is that the baby has additional outside factors that then influence who that baby grows up to be. The artwork, though, is entirely of the person creating it; it doesn’t grow with the potential to be something else, or to behave, or to have intents or to make choices. It’s just an object, or a thing that’s been made.
But hold up: can an object even have a moral standing at all?
Well, sure it can: just think of Mein Kampf (if we can call that a creative work), or what devout Christians thought about Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary in 1996. Art often (but not always) “says” something, even if some works are more wishy-washy in message than others. And by saying something, it’s possible it can take on a moral standing of its own.
So back to the question: does the moral taintedness of the artist necessarily get infused into the artwork, and then by some osmosis get infused into us as viewers? I guess it depends. XXXTantacion says some pretty abominable stuff in his lyrics, and he seems to have lived by his words. While I don’t think everyone who listens to those lyrics is going to turn into a horribly abusive person, it’s certainly possible the ideas permeate society; it’s possible his words inspire someone to act in a bad way who wouldn’t have otherwise done so. But with this example we’re looking not just at an artist that is morally suspect, but work that is on its superficial level morally questionable, too. So when we’re talking about art that has a morally tainted message, and not just art created by a morally tainted person, I think it becomes a different question.
Because look at Chuck Close, accused of sexual harassment by a number of women. He paints “pixelated” close-up portraits. Tainted man, but…what’s the tainted message in his paintings? Honestly, you’d have to look really, really hard, and probably make some stuff up, to find one. So maybe the works of morally tainted artists aren’t necessarily stained; it depends not just on the artist, but the art that’s created.
I suppose my answer here is that a morally tainted artist may create a morally tainted work of art, but may not. The moral standing of the artist alone does not change the moral status of the viewer.
Are we then free to enjoy?
…And the reward
Well, not so fast. There’s still that other question of whether, as viewers, we are condoning or even rewarding moral taintedness by engaging with these works.
Every time I watch a Weinstein movie, a little bit of the prestige and money goes back to Harvey for its production. (Maybe not anymore, since he was ousted from the company — but legal matters aside…his name is still on it.) Every time I watch The Cosby Show, the show’s influence and popularity go up ever so slightly, giving Bill a little bit of the action. Every time I eat at Babbo, Mario Batali’s culinary work is applauded, his ego boosted. When I see a Picasso show at the museum, his estate gains esteem and history congratulates him once again. My actions as a viewer therefore necessarily celebrate not just the work, but the work’s creator.
And finally, this is where things get really hairy, because we don’t want to stop watching/looking at/reading/eating/listening to these works. They bring us happiness, they inspire us, they…spark joy (sorry). So how can we decide that something is morally wrong when we want to do it, and furthermore, keep doing it? Because we do keep doing it. It’s a mind-fuck, no morally-tainted pun intended.
The way I get over this hump (stop me now) is by realizing that even if art rewards its morally corrupt creator, it rewards us — humanity, in common — even more. It’s a rather utilitarian outlook in the sense that it’s about an overall calculation between good and evil, but I think it’s helpful nonetheless, because it allows us to benefit from good works regardless of the nature of their creators. Yes, it’s the easy way out morally, but it’s also really practical. We can’t un-see Silver Linings Playbook.
But — and perhaps this is the art historian-deontologist in me — I also think we have a moral obligation to look at art with its context in mind, and that includes taking a hard look at its creator. If information about a moral transgression is available, I believe we also have a moral duty to take it into account rather than ignore it. And not only that, but we must try to understand the work in its context: given its time and place of making, but also of the person or people who were part of its making.
Art is something which exists to help us understand ourselves and this crazy world, both good and bad, morally upright and depraved. It can even help us hone our moral intuitions — but only if we let it.
Like this story? You might also like reading about whether or not it would be wrong to rape sex robots.
Danielle Mund is an art historian by training and moral philosopher by nature. She writes from Puerto Rico, sometimes holed up in a cool dark room and sometimes beachside at the Ritz.
