The Artist and the Art

Has Hogwarts lost its magic?

Photo by Aditya Vyas on Unsplash

When virtue signals flash like the neon lights of Vegas, it can sometimes slip through the cracks that artists are people, too. They lurk among us, in gyms, coffee shops, and dark alleyways. They vary in form. From notorious transphobes and Twitter creeps to wife beaters and racists, the artist is rarely a perfect specimen. So what then can be said of their art?

Separating the artist from their art can spawn real moral dilemmas. When beloved creators make hateful or controversial statements — when they do heinous things — it’s hard not to jump to conclusions.

In the last few years, censorship has risen to new heights. From book bannings and school curriculum invasions on the Right to celebrity defamations and cancellations on the Left, incursions on free speech have become a bipartisan problem. It often seems that the majority of us harbor a belief in the first amendment that falters when convenient.

When Kanye West came out as a Nazi, it was difficult for me not to fall into the mind set that his entire catalogue should be trashed. Maybe there’s a line that should never be crossed, and maybe he crossed it. But I’d hate to be the one tasked with drawing where that line of morality falls — to arbitrate precisely what represents a crime or statement so atrocious that it can never be rectified.

Many of us would likely agree that a line exists. It’s true that few today will speak well of Adolph Hitler’s art career, after all. Some people are flatly beyond redemption. Yet even mass murder doesn’t close the door to vindication — or veneration — as Christopher Columbus’ continued legacy has shown. Throughout history, there’s no shortage of celebrated tyrants, invaders, and killers. It’s no secret that history is written by the victors.

So while I won’t be listening to Kanye West anytime soon myself, to say that his music should never be heard again is still a step further than I’d be willing to go.

J.K. Rowling, the writer of the Harry Potter series, has become a growing source of controversy in the years’ since her meteoric rise to fame. She’s built a name for herself as a “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist,” often abbreviated as TERF, and has recently fielded blame for helping anti-trans politicians in her country rise to power. It’s possible that the blame is entirely founded.

But those who are now arguing that her literature should never be bought again — the movies or games built on her work never again enjoyed — don’t appreciate what a sweeping demand that is to make. None of us are truly able to stand behind the funneling implications of every dollar we’ve ever spent. There are indirect ways that our hard earned money inevitably ends up aiding the causes we disagree with. The very expenditure of cash helps to prop up a system that subjugates the many in favor of the few.

There was a brief period when I decided to take part in the Chick-fil-A boycott. Learning about the homophobic ways the franchise allocated its revenue, I reasoned I couldn’t justify supporting them. But it wasn’t long before I realized that there were few dollars I spent that didn’t find their ways into the pockets of nefarious billionaires one way or another. I’d established standards that were impossible to uphold.

The gay couple down my street is as virulently anti-Trump as anyone on the block, but it hasn’t prevented them from stocking their fridge with Chick-fil-A sauce. Nor does it need to. But that doesn’t make the people who’ve avoided the franchise any less righteous. No one should ever be required to support the causes that they find abhorrent.

As a lifelong fan of the Harry Potter franchise, my appreciation for it has never dwindled even as its creator has embroiled herself in more and more controversies. While I disagree with almost all of her stances on the trans rights issue, that could never negate what Harry Potter has been throughout my life. What an impact it had on me as a young writer.

It’s one of the many instances where removing the artist from the art is no leap for me. Harvey Weinstein’s criminality doesn’t mean we can’t still watch the vast array of movies associated with him. House of Cards can still be enjoyed when Kevin Spacey is a pedophile. An appreciation of Woody Allen movies doesn’t demand an endorsement of everything he’s ever done in his personal life.

Immanuel Kant believed that our appreciation of art should be based solely on the work itself, independent of the artist’s intentions or moral character. But many feel as though art will forever be intertwined with the character of the person who created it.

Yet in our world, most of us have already developed an ability to appreciate goods of dubious origins, whether wittingly or not. Whether iPhones made in sweatshops or mass-produced burgers laced with carcinogens, some moral is typically violated somewhere along the road in putting groceries into our markets and products onto our store shelves. There are ills in this world that most of us are happy to turn a blind eye to.

But we’re blameless in this blindness. There are problems that would crush us if we grappled with their ubiquity.

To some degree or another, nearly all of us believe that our artists can be separated from their art. Appreciating the great minds and creators of history often demands that we look past their actions. From John Lennon and Walt Disney to Thomas Edison, Aristotle, and Albert Einstein, so many of the personalities that have shaped the world were later revealed to have said and done horrible things.

Most are also willing to relinquish ethical standards for a great enough convenience. Entire nations could hardly resist the allure of Amazon Prime and the next day delivery, even while it’s common knowledge that Jeff Bezos’ moral character is questionable at best.

Getting from point A to point B is more important for most of us than whether we’re incrementally worsening the planet’s pollution problem in our commutes, or whether our cars’ manufacturers are involved in shady business dealings.

It’s discouraging to grasp that very few tools, services, and goods ethically make their way into our lives. So many of the moral crusades against our world’s biggest conglomerates have been fruitless. The common man can’t always afford to support small businesses, nor can those businesses afford to ethically source every item they stock.

Everywhere we go in life we’re confronted with decisions that violate our ethics.

Cars need gas, stomachs need food, and we’ll be evicted from our homes if we don’t fund foreign invasions with our taxes. Half of all needs depend on environmental destruction.

Because I doubt my trash and recycling will be properly disposed of, even taking out the garbage each week feels like a balancing act of morality.

If we try, we can find issue in nearly every facet of life. We live in a world brimming with more problems than we could ever hope to address. Entire lifetimes could be devoted to solving just the minor ones.

We each have battles to pick. It’s up to us whether it’s the battle of what we can ethically listen to and watch on TV or whether it’s the battle against climate change, tyranny, the encroachment of artificial intelligence, or the collapse of our planet’s biodiversity.

In the grand scheme of things, J.K. Rowling’s views on trans rights probably isn’t the greatest issue we’re facing as a species. We have bigger fish to fry. Enjoying a movie that Kevin Spacey is in is no crime, and appreciating the music of a bigot doesn’t mean that you condone genocide. But if your Jewish friend just can’t stomach to hear Kanye West right now, it makes all the sense in the world why they would feel that way. Anti-Semitism is on the rise, and West has helped to promote the prejudice.

Trans people have every reason to be disgusted with Rowling. But continuing to enjoy her world doesn’t need to be viewed as an affront against their identity or a violation of our deeply held beliefs.

People are flawed and perfection isn’t a prerequisite for creation. If we demanded purity from every artist, there’d be little left to read, watch, or hear. Sometimes, appreciating art only requires an acceptance that we ourselves are flawed. That we wouldn’t want to have our life’s work discredited over our perpetually-evolving beliefs — or the unsavory actions we may well come to regret years down the road.

One of art’s most fundamental functions is that it invites us to wrestle with our complexity. Not run from it.

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