I’ve been having an internal crisis this year that I feel is relevant to part if this.
I’ve spent my whole life dedicated to the idea that you can appreciate art in spite of the artist. My favorite author is Lovecraft, his long winded style with a mix of fluttering anxiety and dry academia is deeply relatable to me and while I understand the extreme xenophobia of his beliefs are foundational to how he conveys the horror of his writing, I find it hard to actually see that in the minds eye. When I read about a lost civilization of gorilla people in Africa and the man that took one as his wife, it’s not a coded fear of finding out you’re actually part black, it’s finding out your grandma was banging Gorilla Grod and that’s why you have this much hair.
I was content with this. One can find meaning in art without agreeing with the artist. I’d even go as far as to say we should engage with art like this. A tree without the thrashing of the breeze does not have the roots to support its lofty reach. Like the tree, we must have our convictions and views tested to break those that don’t serve us and strengthen those that do, lest we find ourselves in the ire of this image’s creator as someone who condemns an art for daring to tax our roots.
However, even the taproot of this belief strains under the weight of the gales that are the Epstein situation. So much of the media that I once championed for daring to depict what I read as benal inclusion are shadowed in doubt now. Everyone knows the scene from IT, but when I read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by King, I found it’s inclusion of bathroom activities added to the realism. Shitting your guts out because you drank raw stream water isn’t often detailed in survival stories. Knowing now that King was on the island, the details description of how to piss in the woods as a 12 year old girl, or the cooling comfort of washing her ass in the stream after her explosive ordeal, I have to question whether it’s there for realism or there because he couldn’t justify a gang rape of this character like he could in IT.
It doesn’t stop there. Actors, directors, painters, writers, TV producers, animators, Evey time I take a closer look I find the rebel that dared was not making a bold assertion against the status quo, they were just using their position to make more pornography for themselves. Kricfalusi wasn’t making a statement with Ren and Stimpy, he was half assing a cartoon while extorting two teenagers into being sex pets. Nickelodeon knew, they didn’t care because most of the people responsible for my childhood were using their positions to fuck the children I looked up to. Bakshi didn’t care when he hired Kricfalusi either and now I have to wonder if Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic are the bold critiques of societal wrong or just a fury porno and racism pretending to be intellectuals.
At some point, I think we do have to draw a line, and the more I uncover, the more I find that it would have been justified to put down the media when I felt icky about it.
At one point the devs of Spec Ops: The Line said something that has stuck with me: “putting the game down and walking away is a valid form of engagement”.
I accept that for media, and that’s actually a solid stance from the developers. I’m just struggling with the ubiquity of it all. The island of what I haven’t put down is getting too small to walk away on.
I think it’s possible to enjoy the art of a problematic artist on its own merits. What I don’t particularly like is the hero worship that permeates society and gives problematic artists platforms for their shittiness. The Ed Sheeran thing comes to mind. Dude is known for playing mediocre guitar and singing songs I don’t listen to. I don’t expect deep geopolitical insights from guitar man. I understand people that would take offense at his stance, which to me came across as someone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about it at all and ignored the pleas of his PR team telling him to keep his mouth shut.
The Epstein thing is obviously worse, but we also don’t know the details of that either. Epstein wasn’t an idiot, he schmoozed with everybody, not just the people that paid him to procure children. Did King participate in the pedophilia, or did he just go on vacation to a private island? One of those things is a problem that should be pursued to the fullest extent of the law, and the other is very suspect in retrospect. There was a dude I went to school with who I was friends with for a bit who, about a year after I last talked to him, beat someone half to death and stole their car. Went to jail for it. Does that make me a shitty person? Probably not? Maybe not a great judge of character, but I wasn’t there for the beating nor the theft.
Also, people can change and grow with time. Again, that’s not an excuse to not prosecute King if he was involved in pedophilia, but if he was just hanging out with the wrong crowd, it’s much harder to declare him a lifelong Bad Dude ™. Maybe he had Epstein read a manuscript and Epstein was like “nah man, that’s not what a 12 year old girl peeing sounds like”.
Edit: I was rewatching firefly the other day, and a line from the jaynestown episode comes to mind: “My estimation is that…every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another.”
Take it from someone who has been struggling with the reality that some of the most moving pieces of work are written by terrible people for a very long time, and are deeply infested with troubling views of their depravity, it does not in fact get better. That doesn’t mean there aren’t useful things that can be salvaged from the train-wreck of their work, you just have to be careful how invest in your relationship with that work.
I guess i was just raised that raping children was bad and im looking at my society like “but everyone thinks it’s fine or something? As long as you dont admit it??”.
Was Kendrick Lamar correct that Drake was raping minors?? If not, shouldn’t he be forced to apologize at least? If true, why isn’t Drake in prison so he doesn’t hurt children anymore?? Everyone just kinda forgot about it???
Art is art. What art means is entirely up to the audience to determine regardless of the original intention of the author.
All of those stories are still the stark social commentary you originally interpreted it to be. Your analysis of the art is still valid regardless of the author’s original intent. They still made you question things and feel those emotions. Just because the author is a piece of shit doesn’t take that away from you or make that experience any less valid.
Welcome to the real test of “separating the art from the artist”.
One thing that might help you is for you to make something. That way you know at least one thing wasn’t made by a sex monster for fucked up reasons. If doesn’t even have to be good, but it does help to create. Then realizing there’s a lot of things out there like that, which were made by people who weren’t pieces of shit for piece of shit reasons, and take solace in that.
That’s actually very close to how I’ve been coping. I’m a very versatile DIY type and I’ve been slowly retrofitting jailbroken and FOSS tech into mid century designs as a means of chasing a world that didn’t sell it’s soul as penny stocks.
I’ve been having an internal crisis this year that I feel is relevant to part if this.
I’ve spent my whole life dedicated to the idea that you can appreciate art in spite of the artist. My favorite author is Lovecraft, his long winded style with a mix of fluttering anxiety and dry academia is deeply relatable to me and while I understand the extreme xenophobia of his beliefs are foundational to how he conveys the horror of his writing, I find it hard to actually see that in the minds eye. When I read about a lost civilization of gorilla people in Africa and the man that took one as his wife, it’s not a coded fear of finding out you’re actually part black, it’s finding out your grandma was banging Gorilla Grod and that’s why you have this much hair.
I was content with this. One can find meaning in art without agreeing with the artist. I’d even go as far as to say we should engage with art like this. A tree without the thrashing of the breeze does not have the roots to support its lofty reach. Like the tree, we must have our convictions and views tested to break those that don’t serve us and strengthen those that do, lest we find ourselves in the ire of this image’s creator as someone who condemns an art for daring to tax our roots.
However, even the taproot of this belief strains under the weight of the gales that are the Epstein situation. So much of the media that I once championed for daring to depict what I read as benal inclusion are shadowed in doubt now. Everyone knows the scene from IT, but when I read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by King, I found it’s inclusion of bathroom activities added to the realism. Shitting your guts out because you drank raw stream water isn’t often detailed in survival stories. Knowing now that King was on the island, the details description of how to piss in the woods as a 12 year old girl, or the cooling comfort of washing her ass in the stream after her explosive ordeal, I have to question whether it’s there for realism or there because he couldn’t justify a gang rape of this character like he could in IT.
It doesn’t stop there. Actors, directors, painters, writers, TV producers, animators, Evey time I take a closer look I find the rebel that dared was not making a bold assertion against the status quo, they were just using their position to make more pornography for themselves. Kricfalusi wasn’t making a statement with Ren and Stimpy, he was half assing a cartoon while extorting two teenagers into being sex pets. Nickelodeon knew, they didn’t care because most of the people responsible for my childhood were using their positions to fuck the children I looked up to. Bakshi didn’t care when he hired Kricfalusi either and now I have to wonder if Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic are the bold critiques of societal wrong or just a fury porno and racism pretending to be intellectuals.
At some point, I think we do have to draw a line, and the more I uncover, the more I find that it would have been justified to put down the media when I felt icky about it.
At one point the devs of Spec Ops: The Line said something that has stuck with me: “putting the game down and walking away is a valid form of engagement”.
I accept that for media, and that’s actually a solid stance from the developers. I’m just struggling with the ubiquity of it all. The island of what I haven’t put down is getting too small to walk away on.
Been unsure how to phrase this, so.
I think it’s possible to enjoy the art of a problematic artist on its own merits. What I don’t particularly like is the hero worship that permeates society and gives problematic artists platforms for their shittiness. The Ed Sheeran thing comes to mind. Dude is known for playing mediocre guitar and singing songs I don’t listen to. I don’t expect deep geopolitical insights from guitar man. I understand people that would take offense at his stance, which to me came across as someone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about it at all and ignored the pleas of his PR team telling him to keep his mouth shut.
The Epstein thing is obviously worse, but we also don’t know the details of that either. Epstein wasn’t an idiot, he schmoozed with everybody, not just the people that paid him to procure children. Did King participate in the pedophilia, or did he just go on vacation to a private island? One of those things is a problem that should be pursued to the fullest extent of the law, and the other is very suspect in retrospect. There was a dude I went to school with who I was friends with for a bit who, about a year after I last talked to him, beat someone half to death and stole their car. Went to jail for it. Does that make me a shitty person? Probably not? Maybe not a great judge of character, but I wasn’t there for the beating nor the theft.
Also, people can change and grow with time. Again, that’s not an excuse to not prosecute King if he was involved in pedophilia, but if he was just hanging out with the wrong crowd, it’s much harder to declare him a lifelong Bad Dude ™. Maybe he had Epstein read a manuscript and Epstein was like “nah man, that’s not what a 12 year old girl peeing sounds like”.
Edit: I was rewatching firefly the other day, and a line from the jaynestown episode comes to mind: “My estimation is that…every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another.”
The firefly quote actually helps me a lot in dealing with this.
Take it from someone who has been struggling with the reality that some of the most moving pieces of work are written by terrible people for a very long time, and are deeply infested with troubling views of their depravity, it does not in fact get better. That doesn’t mean there aren’t useful things that can be salvaged from the train-wreck of their work, you just have to be careful how invest in your relationship with that work.
I guess i was just raised that raping children was bad and im looking at my society like “but everyone thinks it’s fine or something? As long as you dont admit it??”.
Was Kendrick Lamar correct that Drake was raping minors?? If not, shouldn’t he be forced to apologize at least? If true, why isn’t Drake in prison so he doesn’t hurt children anymore?? Everyone just kinda forgot about it???
Art is art. What art means is entirely up to the audience to determine regardless of the original intention of the author.
All of those stories are still the stark social commentary you originally interpreted it to be. Your analysis of the art is still valid regardless of the author’s original intent. They still made you question things and feel those emotions. Just because the author is a piece of shit doesn’t take that away from you or make that experience any less valid.
Welcome to the real test of “separating the art from the artist”.
One thing that might help you is for you to make something. That way you know at least one thing wasn’t made by a sex monster for fucked up reasons. If doesn’t even have to be good, but it does help to create. Then realizing there’s a lot of things out there like that, which were made by people who weren’t pieces of shit for piece of shit reasons, and take solace in that.
That’s actually very close to how I’ve been coping. I’m a very versatile DIY type and I’ve been slowly retrofitting jailbroken and FOSS tech into mid century designs as a means of chasing a world that didn’t sell it’s soul as penny stocks.
I think it’s okay to like a shitty person’s art as long as they are dead.
That seems fair.
But I won’t give my money to shitty people still alive.
I think that’s an idea I can get behind. That or if a subculture steals that art for themselves.
Nobody was talking about pedophiles, yeah draw the line there thats fine.