It’s something I struggle with. Some bad news comes out about some public persona doing something shitty and they get cancelled. But sometimes I really struggle with giving up the things they’ve made because I like them. There are also occasions where the person has been accused of something and it doesn’t seem true to me, or I think they’re genuinely sorry and have been punished enough, and the context isn’t being considered.
What do you think? Who do you feel conflicted about enjoying?
Let’s be real here, if the artist created great work and then was also a killer, not only is the painting still just as aesthetically pleasing as it always was, but if we are going to care about what they did outside of the art, it only makes the art more interesting as an example of the varied nature of humanity. The same individual produced heinous murder and exquisite beauty.
That is certainly a personal preference someone might have. But the point is, if you know the painting you have displayed, is made by a child molester. You might not feel particularly comfortable with having his painting. Despite it being an otherwise beautiful piece of art.
I don’t care if Hitlers paintings are worth lots of money today. I wouldn’t want it anywhere near my place.
And that kind of knee-jerk avoidance of anything uncomfortable is at the core of reactionary thinking. If it makes you uncomfortable to be near something a child molester has touched, will you abandon their victims? The home they lived in? The clothes which they owned once but that others could use? The sidewalk they walked along to get to the scene of their crimes? Shall we all expel the things that make us uncomfortable? Some people are made uncomfortable by foreigners, and people who look different. Don’t tell me ‘but that’s different.’ It’s not. It’s the same reactionary childishness, and it might make you uncomfortable to acknowledge it, but that’s why we can’t use discomfort as a measure.
Sure, but you displaying it also communicates to your guests that you’re not disgusted enough by his actions to remove it, and also that you’re not embarrassed that you financially supported someone evil.
That makes an assumption that it is one’s moral responsibility to dispose of work made by someone who did something wrong. That’s pure circular argument. As for supporting someone evil, that might apply if you bought it after you found out what they were doing, but it is absurd to complain about something someone did with no way of knowing what it might go toward. It is also absurd to require people to investigate every facet of every possible person they could interact with. If you are walking down the street and meet someone running a hotdog cart, will you hold off on the purchase until you can run a background check? What if they’re actually ‘evil?’ *furious eyebrow wiggles* This kind of purity policing is silly, like placing the burden of climate change on the person who didn’t separate their recycling.
Hey you said the negative history of the artist made the art more interesting, so i was just saying it’s more nuanced than that. We all (me definitely) own stuff from evil people/ corporations, but art is different because it’s not meant to be functional, it’s meant to make you feel something. It’s more susceptible to changing meaning based on creator than a T- shirt, a phone, or a pair of shoes