The wall between art and artists
When a plumber or an electrician comes knocking on your door, do you care to know the person’s background? Does it matter to you what he had done in his personal capacity or, for that matter, even public? As long as he manages to repair your leaking sink or fix your blinking tubelight, does any of the garbage from his past concern you? At that point of interaction, even the fact that he is/was a molester is alright with you as long as you don’t know about it.
Ignorance is bliss—for real.
If you are well aware of his sexual transgressions (it’s amazing how obsessed we are with sex despite coming so far in the animal kingdom, isn’t it?), chances are you wouldn’t even want to let the person step in through the door. The reason could vary from being averse to contact with a misconducting person to carrying out the age old tradition of self-preservation. You don’t want to thrust yourself within the radius of a possible predator.
Whatever you choose to do with whatever data you have at your disposal in the above situation is alright given the personal space in question.
Now, let’s switch our gears a bit here. For argument’s sake, a public figure like an actor or a director or a comedian is said—and not necessarily proven in a court of law — to have been guilty of unbecoming behaviour. In such a case, it becomes increasingly harrowing to separate the person from his work. No matter how great Marlon Brando was, the tales of his on-set misdemeanors might make you hesitate a bit in appreciating him fully. Similarly, irrespective of Roman Polanski’s oeuvre, you might flinch after reading everything about his pedophilic conviction. Bill Cosby’s ceaseless wrongs against vulnerable women aren’t exactly funny. Suffice to say, the list doesn’t stop at these three categories of people but the thing common to them is art.
Being an artist, your work is out there in the world and still, it’s not alone. You are with it. All the time. There’s no Godfather (1972) without Brando. There’s no Rosemary’s Baby (1968) without Polanski. There’s no The Cosby Show (1984) without Cosby. The identity of the creator is the hallmark of art. Needless to remind art continues to nurture itself without the bylines. Names are for mortals, art is celestial. Yet, we’d be remiss to understand the lack of comity between what we see and what we desire to see. Someone who thoroughly enjoyed Last Tango in Paris (1972) and doesn’t know that Brando allegedly assaulted his younger co-star in that film would continue to see him in a gleaming light. It’s only when information — whether assertively true or mere nasty rumour s— floats in front of your eyes that you’re supposed to put yourself in a decisive position. That’s when you slam the gavel on what you really think of an artwork because it’s fundamentally difficult to separate the art from an artist. And in the process, you end up revealing who you truly are.
