If the artist gives 25% of their income to fund the orphan crushing machine, I'm incentivized to give them 0% of mine.

If someone sucks I think about that when observing their art. There is so much good stuff in the world by good people that I don't see a need to support bad artists.

My personal opinion, it's about not wanting to support evil. I really want to watch the Harry Potter series and listen to the full cast audiobook, but I don't want to give money to Rowling to fund things that hurt transgender people. If it weren't for that, I'd watch the series. I still love Harry Potter

Well take JKR, for example. You consume Harry Potter content and a portion of the royalties go to her. She then funds anti-trans movements like For Woman Scotland.

Thus, if you consume Harry Potter content you're supporting anti-trans causes. Personally I can't have that on my conscience.

i just find it hard to watch louis c.k. without thinking about him jerking off in front of his employees. it makes him less fun to watch i guess.

Just want to point out that the so-called critics of cancel culture are the most obvious and strictest advocates for it, they just want to have unilateral authority to do it.

For me the art pays the artist. So i enjoy my right to exercise my small but still there economic power. The artist also use their image to heavily market the art so for me they are intertwined. It did get ok for a while for actors, we understand they play a role, however if the make decisions that entangle themself in unacceptable behavior then bad luck. You don't get to only play and profit from the hero whilst acting like a arsehole.

Art is political.

If they use their money to do evil shit, like funding wars against queer people, then giving them money actively supports funding wars against queer people. That makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is throwing away/destroying decades old media becsuse it was discovered last week that the artist who made it was, in fact, a piece of shit. That's not hurting them nor is it sending a message. Just don't buy any new shit from 'em.

Separating the art from the artist is usually meant for academic settings when discussing works from people who were flawed (I'm using very mild language) or who we see through a modern lens as problematic. It's how we can talk about the themes and IP that Lovecraft created despite him being a truly garbage human being in his life.

I think we have collectively co-opted the phrase to try and engage with entertainment we like when the artist is problematic. I think that's generally okay if the artist is no longer alive or does not own the IP anymore.

If an artist is alive and actively a shitty person, then it's not really possible to separate their art from them in my opinion (again, non-academically). Doing so can give money, clout, or other forms of power to further enable them. That's why we've been seeing "cancel culture" grow, because boycotting is one of the few ways to limit an artist's reach if they are using their art or status to hurt people.

As an aside, depending on the artist's actions or reputation, it is genuinely seen as suspect to engage with their art outside of academia even if they are dead. This can be especially true if the art itself espouses dangerous or very hurtful ideas. A common example is stuff like Mein Kampf, which has been studied academically/historically in order to understand it. I think anyone would be wary of someone saying they are a fan of it though.

I can. After the artist has been dead for 50 years.

Why are conservatives always so upset at the consequences of a free market?

There's so much art, its so accessible with the internet, why am I going to waste time enjoying stuff made by pieces of shit? I want them forgotton. I can enjoy art made by good people instead.

They say art is a conversation between the artist and the viewer.

I don't want to have a conversation with a rapist. I don't want to associate with people who hate trans people.

If I had a friend and found out these things about them, I would cut them out of my life.

Did you cheat on your wife or commit tax fraud? Maybe it changes the interactions, but I'm not going to cut you out entirely.

That line will be different for everyone

I just can't. I'll strive for immersion into some fantasy world and suddenly I'm wait? Wasn't that the actor who was accused of dismembering their spouse? And that's very distracting. Same for re-reading Harry Potter and always being on the lookout for some red flags. It just takes a good amount of fun out of it.

And while being a liberal, there's some people who aren't on my side. I don't listen to right-wing metal. Why would I? And if someone cancels them, I'd give those people a round of applause. I mean I don't want to set the band members on fire. But they can do a different job?! Their art sucks.

"Separate art from artist" is one of those vague phrases that can mean very different things depending on context.

From a media analysis perspective, it can mean to simply evaluate the work on its own without considering who made it or authorial intent. Another way of saying Death of the Author. This is a valid lens of media analysis, but it should not be the only lens.

More often though it gets used as a way of saying "I'm just going to pretend any controversies surrounding the author don't exist and enjoy it anyway." Now I'm not going to tell anyone they can't enjoy anything by problematic creators, because I certainly have my share of such works I still enjoy. I'm not pure and I think anyone who claims to be is lying.

But I still think it is necessary to acknowledge and engage with those controversies - especially when it comes to financially supporting such creators or boosting their platform. You have to decide for yourself where to draw the line, but you should make that decision without plugging your ears and sticking your head in the sand.

The worst way of using this phrase though, is when people use it to mean "You should pretend any controversies surrounding the author don't exist, stop bringing it up, don't even talk about it. I don't want to do any introspection about it, so it makes me feel insecure when anyone else does." When people try to use it as a conversation stopper in response to controversy, that's complete bullshit.

Consider H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was a hugely influential writer who spawned an entire subgenre of horror. He was also a horrible racist, and that puts his body of work in a different light when you recognize how much of it is ultimately about fear of Other.

As far as media analysis goes, it's not like his work is inherently racist. Just because he was a bigot doesn't mean his writing is. But his bigotry certainly did influence his writing, and it's necessary to understand this to truly understand Lovecraft. Lovecraft is tied to his work in a way that can't fully be separated.

From a financial perspective, Lovecraft is long dead, and all of his work has passed into the public domain. Reading his work won't fuel further bigotry, and so I don't think it's something anyone has to feel bad about.

There's a term I'm drawing a blank on just now that refers to one's tendency/ability to think of things as separable. It's something like high vs. low segmentation/delineation/compartmentalisation/discretion individuals. For some people, different aspects of a person/concept/etc. can be more readily separated in their consideration. For others, the associations are too strong to be ignored.

Some people have low (word I am having trouble remembering). These are people who cannot or have difficulty in separating different elements of consideration. These are people who say the only way to understand, say, The Lord of the Rings is to understand Tolkien, or that one cannot separate the mysogyny of Tomas from the music of Nightwish. They are also the kind of person who, if they met Ted Bundy in the office, would then have great difficulty reconciling that friendly experience with new information saying he was a murderer.

Some people are high (word). They split concepts frequently and easily. These are people who can look at things which are connected by being parts of the same whole but consider each part separately, like say, looking at the beliefs of Ted Kaczynski and saying he was right about this one technology but wrong about bombing as the optimal solution, or that it's wrong to murder but eating the dead is fine. These are also the kind of people who are more capable of meeting someone, being their friend for years, trusting them, but still having the cognitive distance to see the evidence in front of them and realise their friend is abusing his daughter, even if that doesn't comport with how they have previously seen that friend.

Each way of thinking is as alien to the opposing end of the spectrum as introverts vs extroverts or the religious vs materialists.

There's the money but also by engaging with work from an artist, even if you don't pay, you are usually increasing their cultural cachet. This can be through things like engagement statistics (making them more likely to be recommended by algorithms, get more royalties, and be more likely to get further investments) or even just word of mouth. This can both help them financially and make their behaviour seem more acceptable in society (even when the issues are acknowledged).

How this interacts with forgiveness and growth is tricky because we need that for people to not reject the part of society that is critical of them but earning back trust on such a large scale is very difficult. I don't think there's one solution but it is good to be aware of the problems.

I think it’s (at least in part) instinctive: humans have probably been listening to storytellers for hundreds of thousands of years, and their stories shape our worldview and society. Rejecting the narratives of storytellers with destructive views would have had real survival value.

We can't. We never could, and never will. Art is inextricable from the context that created it, which includes the artist(s), the time, the place, the culture and acquaintances and ideas that are all woven into the fabric of the work.

When we say "separate the art from the artist" we mean we elect to ignore a part of the art that makes us uncomfortable, but ignoring a thing neither makes it not so nor prevents it from influencing us. Art has ideas and subideas the same way a musical note has overtones, but on a million different ontological dimensions. The artist is only aware of some of these; the others are assumptions, biases, cultural and personal blindnesses, prejudices, coincidences, and bursts of artistic genius.

Side note: you don't have a one-way relationship with art. If you think you can experience art without that art changing you in some way, you are merely blind to its influence. Art changes you. Not always in big ways, and not always for the better. Your options are to either acknowledge and explore the nature of that change, or not. Even refusing to engage with a work of art is an acknowledgement of that work's influence on you.

Back to the main note: even though it's impossible to really separate art from its context (like where it came from), ignoring the context does flatten the appearance of the art and make some of the ideological overtones of the art invisible. We do this for all kinds of reasons: art as unchallenging entertainment is easier to consume passively, so ignoring the challenging parts of it feels good. Like enjoying the rhythm and melody of a pop song without dealing with the misogynistic lyrics, or the political affiliations of the artists. Thinking about those things is hard. Not thinking about them is easy, and it gets easier with practice. Practice ignoring the uncomfortable parts of art long enough and it becomes habitual. Eventually you ignore them without even thinking about them.

They don't stop affecting you, though. Those overtones seep into your brain and influence your thinking in ways you will never be aware of, because you have lost the ability to detect them. It happens gradually. After ten thousand subliminal messages, you'll hold beliefs you neither understand nor can even fully articulate, and you won't know how to change them. It's possible, but it takes almost as long to undo as it takes to do, because they're hard to find.

Second side note: Propagandists are well aware of this property of art, which is why propaganda works, more or less, even when the audience "knows" its propaganda. It's a quantity over quality thing: the overtones slip though unobserved even if you are aware of the main gist of the piece.

That's why you don't separate the art from the artist. You can't, and pretending to do so denies what art does, much to your detriment.