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I always thought there was something about J R Hartley.
The past is a foreign country...
I always thought there was something about J R Hartley.
[I'm not singling out the artist of the above here, for all I know the paintbrush has given them a way to express themselves and so reach some measure of peace with the world]If Art is a window to the soul (may have made that up) then he can't be all bad in my eyes.
But you can avoid them because they're brats, prosecute them for crimes and don't buy their product.Is it a special set of blinkers or just a matter of how practical it is? Doctors and engineers have a license you can take away, if they misbehave. That doesn't work for painters or musicians.
Despite the fact that William Burroughs shot and killed his wife while drunk, he was still considered a genius by Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouack, among many others. I can forgive bizarre political and philosophical ideas, if the art is good; but murder is a step too far.
Oh FFS, I saw this comment and thought it must be about a certain Arthurian novel which I didn't like so I googled it and am very upset to realise it's not that series at all. It's someone else's. Someone whose books I absolutely loved.I really struggle with this… one of my favourite ever Arthurian retellings is totally marred since I learned of the allegations of child abuse against the author. And the fact she endorsed her husband’s relationship with an underage boy. I’d love to be able to divorce the two, but just can’t.
I envy those who can.
I listen to black metal and some of those bands - Dissection and Burzum for example - murdered people. As long as it's not in the music, or the lyrics or anything like that, I can look past it.Despite the fact that William Burroughs shot and killed his wife while drunk, he was still considered a genius by Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouack, among many others. I can forgive bizarre political and philosophical ideas, if the art is good; but murder is a step too far.
Wish we still had the sad face emoji…. There are definitely things I can look past, but this one is just… no. And like you, I not only liked the Arthurian novel, but some of the more mainstream sci-fi they wrote. It ruined one of my comfort reads for me.Oh FFS, I saw this comment and thought it must be about a certain Arthurian novel which I didn't like so I googled it and am very upset to realise it's not that series at all. It's someone else's. Someone whose books I absolutely loved.
I won't be reading or recommending those any more then. I don't have a huge issue listening to Burzum or Dissection but this is different.
I'm interested in how much people can or should divorce the creator from creator.
My particular fortean interests mean that I sometimes want to possess a physical think, or support a concert or whatever, and the creator is someone I really don't want to endorse.
I've recently gone back to listening to a composer having had my enjoyment curtailed by knowing about the politics.
I've got the chance to buy some wood engravings/etchings by an artist where I love the work but the private life is a huge cringe (and then some).
One of the best fortean fiction writers I know (and who helped to get me into it!) is a convicted child abuser.
Anyone else with this quandary? I haven't put names in (all three are firmly dead though) for possible legal reasons.
Ms F - since you started this interesting thread, I was wondering if you had reached any conclusions about buying the prints you liked.
Re-reading my post I see how I may have given the impression of redemption through Art - but actually I'm more worried about an assumption that great Art cannot be produced by a bad person. As an artist's reputation suffers then so does the critique of new and existing Work.It's a great picture, but isn't this the nub of the issue - that somehow if one produces 'some great art' the creator must be in some way redeemable? Or merely 'flawed', but otherwise great?
I may have stuffed up, I think (or thought) I was trying to say that great art can be produced by a less than stellar person, but people tend to think the opposite is the case, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. When this happens we call it "artistic temperament".Re-reading my post I see how I may have given the impression of redemption through Art - but actually I'm more worried about an assumption that great Art cannot be produced by a bad person. As an artist's reputation suffers then so does the critique of new and existing Work.
Totally agree with you about 21st century morals.Love the art, hate the artist.
But only art?
I'm not sure whether it's a peculiarly modern urge to desire a personal link between artist and audience as opposed to one between viewer and artwork.
In the absence of concrete biographical information (I recently posted a bear carved of amber from the Mesolithic—the artist has been lost to prehistory), is the stronger tendency to emotionally connect with the artwork in isolation, or to reconstruct an implied author from the work and its context and foist emotions on the fictional construct? @James_H ?
Certainly, if the inventor of, say, the flush toilet, turned out to be an extreme bastard, most people would feel no compunction to return to pits of soil since we seem not to sense the same moral aspect in the enjoyment of the utility of more functional products as we do artworks.
Is this hypocritical or a by-product of Romanticism? Heroic artists create authentic art, therefore for art to be truly heroic it must have been created by heroes?
Personally, I read a lot of nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction. None of the authors measures up to twenty-first century morals (the twentieth and twenty-first centuries rarely live up to twenty-first century morals!), so I spend very little time fussing over their personal failings unless a) they are huge, b) they are my specific point of enquiry.
The next part of a famous quotation reads:
Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
So I work without any assumption that I should find points of moral agreement beyond those that are clearly identifiable in their work. If, by happy coincidence, the creator was an abnormally saintly person, that's a bonus, I suppose, but not really one to which I give much thought; perhaps I feel differently about artists from my own era—they seem to lack a convincing excuse for failing to measure up.
Almost all of us are going to be found wanting by the students of the future. A few of us will be condemned fairly for hideous actions, others will be lauded for our forward-thinking enlightenment, but most average people (not especially good or bad) will be lumped into a mass of unenlightened barbarians who didn't try hard enough by our myopic descendants. Worse, you likely won't even know the reasons why, because many of them haven't been created yet!
In rambling conclusion: don't sweat the small stuff; don't hope to meet your heroes; keep your powder dry for the real monsters, and then do your best to separate the treasures in their caves from their foetid corpses.
Your case two - we name the same author in our posts. Ironically though, on the bloodline topic, I never saw it as a central theme. When I read his work, I gloss over those silly lines about inferior types and focus on the horror. Maybe that is just my filter at work!I'm fine with it most of the time, but where is gets more complicated is when the dodgy aspect of the artist's life becomes a (n essential) component of the artwork.
Case one: a late romantic operatic composer, unusually anti-semitic for his time, wrote amazing music, but some of the characters in his dramas are manifestations of anti-jewish stereotypes.
Case two: seminal 'eldritch' horror writer whose obsession with race and the 'corruption' of 'pure' blood lines formed a central theme in his work.
In both cases, the work wouldn't be the same without the artists' racism, which makes adds more caveats to appreciating the artwork.
For me, no. Lovely people though they are, their appeal is their work, not their charity work.An interesting reversal question: do some people like mediocre or uninspired art created by beloved creators who share all your values? For example, are there creators who do something positive for the community whose work you follow because you feel compelled to due to their various stands/efforts, but in reality while you read or view the art they make it doesn't stick with you, whereas the art that actually gets you properly intregied and invested comes mostly from the work of people you disagree with?
I really think for that author it goes beyond 'silly lines' to the centre of his fears. Unfortunately I can't too specific but I really think 'bloodline impurity' was a huge anxiety for him, and forms the backbone to a lot of his most famous stories. This is something I would say goes beyond 'casual racism' (as would be typical of anyone of anyone of his time in a similar social position) and into 'cranky, obsessive racism'.Your case two - we name the same author in our posts. Ironically though, on the bloodline topic, I never saw it as a central theme. When I read his work, I gloss over those silly lines about inferior types and focus on the horror. Maybe that is just my filter at work!
I tend to resist artwork that deliberately fits into 'acceptable' or fashionable ethics in order that it will be accepted, even if they're the ethics I personally hold. I much prefer it when good artists say what they want to, even if I don't agree with it, because it's much more artistically authentic and interesting.An interesting reversal question: do some people like mediocre or uninspired art created by beloved creators who share all your values? For example, are there creators who do something positive for the community whose work you follow because you feel compelled to due to their various stands/efforts, but in reality while you read or view the art they make it doesn't stick with you, the art that actually gets you properly intregied and invested comes mostly from the work of people you disagree with?
Love the art, hate the artist.
But only art?