Hacker News Reader

Comment by SV_BubbleTime | Hacker News Reader

I find it difficult to understand the immaturity of not being able to separate the art and artist. It’s really not difficult. I think some of it is performative for signaling to one’s peers that they are on the “right side” of some issue or imagined virtue.

View on HN

It's not about immature people being unable to separate art from artist because it's difficult. The issue is whether it's the right thing to do.

I feel pretty confident that I could describe to you a case (either real or hypothetical) where you would reject an artist based on their personal behavior, rather than their art. You would find it quite difficult in such a case to separate the two.

So the question is where to draw the line, and everyone answers that question differently.

What you are doing is not maturity, but compartmentalisation. If you simply refuse to hear a single piece of evidence of, say, Michael Jackson’s pedophilia, or Roman Polanski’s repeated rape accusations, you are choosing willful ignorance, especially since often the artist’s status and fame make their criminal behaviour possible and provides them shelter from prosecution.

I myself am far from innocent of this. For more than 20 years Polanski has been, and in many ways still is, my favourite film maker. Repulsion, Tenant, Chinatown etc. are masterpieces of cinema. But they are inherently, even on plot level (at least in the case of Chinatown) intertwined with the horror of his actions. There is no virtue signalling in my personal connection to his set of work (who would even care anyway), but for me to continue pretend I know nothing about his behaviour or that it doesn’t directly inflect upon his work would be deeply dishonest.

I too thought of Polanski (Roman, not Zac) while reading these threads. I’m not sure the comparison or perhaps, the parallel holds though. PO’b may have been a bad husband. Or he may have been married to a bad wife. Or maybe they were both a bit rough. I don’t know an any real evidence either way, and life has taught me that it’s hard to see inside the truth of other people’s relationships. I have trouble enough with my own, and I’m present in real-time!

Polanski R is not the same thing. He drugged and raped a child and was defended for decades by people who ought to know better because of his directorial genius. I don’t dispute that genius. I just can’t watch his movies again without feeling a little sick.

All of this to say, judging Polanski for being a monster is not the same as judging PO’b for being a jerk. I reread the Aubrey-Maturin novels every four or five years and they enrich my life on every occasion. And I don’t feel even slightly bad about it.

(Disappointingly, I did lose an argument over a big family dinner several years ago when it turned it that tracklement is a neologism. Imagine my embarrassment!)

I hoped it obvious that I am not comparing being a liar and a bad family man to being a serial rapist (unsurprisingly there is quite few allegations of this exact same behaviour against Polanski). I simply used Polanski and MJ as obvious examples of A) why not separating the art and artist absolutely is not just “immature virtue signaling” B) how people loving the art are able to compartmentalise the evidence and suffering of the victims to keep enjoying the art, meanwhile making any justice very difficult.

There’s artist with whom we can “forget everything else”, then there’s not. Where one draws the line, well, I suppose that up to one’s own discretion, but I would recommend offering a serious thought on where oneself draws the line.

ah, my apologies. I read more than you wrote. I think you and I are probably more in agreement than not. I read a book last year, "Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People" by Claire Dederer, on this topic. Good in parts. Left me hanging. She talks a lot about several probably bad people, Polanski, Woody Allen, Picasso etc. But she never seems to hit a conclusion. Maybe that's the answer; there is no easy, pat answer. You just have to push through each case, as you find it, according to your judgement at the time.

While writing this, I dug out a Reddit thread about the book, where one of the participants (YakSlothLemon FTW!) hits us with Wagner. Well, yes, game over. I'm not a fan of that sort of (to my ears) overcooked opera, but if you like it, play it. The dirtbag isn't getting any royalties because he's good and dead.

> If you simply refuse to hear a single piece of evidence of, say, Michael Jackson’s pedophilia

Interesting example. There is more credible evidence of parents of “his child friends” being in it for a cash grab than actual wrong doing.

Evidence was your bar there.

No there isn’t. There’s multiple of allegations over decades, a grown man admitting to sleep with children, paying people silent, having a security cameras and safety system front of his bedroom, adult men speaking on public with their own face about the abuse, gaining nothing.

Dismissing all the evidence requires wilful ignorance and kind of compartmentalisation I was talking about. You are just cherrypicking facts to fit your world view, or more likely, you let someone else to do it for you, as so many people are today. And that is a very dangerous road to take.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com