Can we separate the artist from the art?

[LitNetIsGreat]

Another very interesting question.

I think that there are many different degrees of thought upon this topic with no real “right” or “wrong” answer. It was Proust who said something along the lines that we read in order to see our own thoughts better articulated by better writers. In this sense then we attach personality to the art we are engaging with and like to identify we someone else in another time perhaps.

Though ultimately it is the art that is the only thing of importance and not the personality of the artist. Just as Barthes argues about the importance of the reader over the author in things like “The Death of the Author” individual interpretation is god and nothing else is of any real value. Of course this does not mean that we are not interested in the artist or in the period that it was produced, we generally are, but the art itself must take centre stage, always.

[stlukesguild]

What is intriguing about about Jozy drawing the line at Birth of a Nation... or many others who cannot appreciate Leni Riefenstahl's achievements... in spite of the fact that there most certainly are elements that go well beyond propaganda in the service of the Nazis... is the fact that that it seems as if the nearness of these issues make for the troubling nature of the work. Aggrandizing portraits of Napoleon raise no such problems... in spite of what Napoleon unleashed upon many in Europe. Neither do we find Michelangelo's Last Judgment disturbing in spite of the fact that at a certain level it was a grand work of propaganda in service of the Counter-Reformation and all that entailed. I raise these questions in part because I frequently come across posts questioning us as to what literary character we admire... what writer we admire... but I have long felt that one could admire the art while disliking the artist and much that he/she has to say. But then I'm just a formalist and an aesthete... too much Pater, Wilde, Baudelaire, and Proust.

[stlukesguild]

...are you the judge of just how immoral their actions and what kind of behavior were acceptable?

This is a key question as well. Do we damn a work of art because the values expressed go against what we believe personally... or even what is currently acceptable in our culture? Can we not then expect the same? Indeed... might we not even suggest that while certain values of an older culture appear unacceptable to us, many of our values would have appeared just as unacceptable to them?

[stlukesguild]

It was Proust who said something along the lines that we read in order to see our own thoughts better articulated by better writers.

Or Pope: "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

But then, as I noted in my posting on "why do you read?" I don't really read simply to reinforce my own experiences, beliefs, prejudices, etc...

[integrity]

Would you enjoy reading an incredibly well-written fictional story about the molestation of an innocent child that was written by a person with a known history of pedophilia? Say it was written in a "pro-pedophilia" way. (And I'm not talking about Lolita; I'm talking about a person who really has sexually molested children over and over.)

Would you praise it? Would you damn it? Or would you simply not read it?

Well, ****, I know what my answer would be.

[JBI]

Depends how well written it was. Seriously, you don't need to agree with a writer to enjoy their works. Like I mentioned before, Lewis Carrol, a pedophile who wrote about pedophilia.

[Jozanny]

Another very interesting question.

I think that there are many different degrees of thought upon this topic with no real “right” or “wrong” answer. It was Proust who said something along the lines that we read in order to see our own thoughts better articulated by better writers. In this sense then we attach personality to the art we are engaging with and like to identify we someone else in another time perhaps.

I'd add a caveat, that perhaps between a creative artist's rung on the canon, and a consumer's personal taste, there is some room for independent assessment? The tug of war between integrity and mortalterror over Hemingway seems to have their respective personal values attached to how they read his work.

Is it at all possible that Hemingway achieved things as an author which have intrinsic merit, even if A sees animal killings as unethical and B relishes Hemingway's tough-guy conceit?

Again, this isn't an exact science, but I believe it is possible to temper personal taste when providing critical valuations, not that I am well read on scholarship Hemingway has generated, but his work as a journalist led to important stylistic elements being added to American fiction, and for these things he has his place as an American writer who advanced the craft of fiction. One only needs to look at Dubus for a more modern, possibly more sympathetic, variation on Hemingway's coloring of American masculinity.

As to Birth of the Nation, I have read critics who echo luke about its value to 20th century film-making, but I associate the product too closely with American genocide, and that hump, like Nazi propagada films, is a difficult one to clear for the sake of aesthetic value. Not that the issue will resolve itself anytime soon.

Carivaggio is so far removed that it is difficult in terms of art appreciation not to appreciate the power of his art due to the fact that he killed someone--but his guilt haunted him, as evident in the beheaded painting. I'll let luke find it since I've lost patience with less than five minutes on Google.

[stlukesguild]

Carivaggio is so far removed that it is difficult in terms of art appreciation not to appreciate the power of his art due to the fact that he killed someone--but his guilt haunted him, as evident in the beheaded painting. I'll let luke find it since I've lost patience with less than five minutes on Google.

I doubt... from what I've read of Caravaggio... that he had many moments of a guilty conscience tormenting him... chased by Aeschylean furies. He actually painted many violent scenes... including several beheadings. His Judith and Holofernes is dated well before his murderous duel... and he engages in several other duels and brawls that involved serious injuries to himself... and others.

[Michigan J Frog]

Would you enjoy reading an incredibly well-written fictional story about the molestation of an innocent child that was written by a person with a known history of pedophilia? Say it was written in a "pro-pedophilia" way. (And I'm not talking about Lolita; I'm talking about a person who really has sexually molested children over and over.)

Would you praise it? Would you damn it? Or would you simply not read it?

Well, ****, I know what my answer would be.

If it's so well written that I consider it art, I would love to read it.

To me, really, an artist should never be condemned, for any reason.

[MorpheusSandman]

In short: Yes

In a bit longer: Absolutely

I think the notion about disliking art because of a dislike of the artist is a gross misjudgment by those that hold the notion. Perhaps the primary reason is that art has often been about revealing parts of our nature we'd rather like to forget. Many artists who would be labeled jerks or any number of negative adjectives are often, as much as we hate to admit it, just more honest versions of most people. Artists are rather infamous for living somewhat outside traditional societal, cultural, and moral constraints, and that's often WHY they produce such great art - because they see things others don't. Or at least they have an ability to dismantle the very artifices we build up, or to express parts of their humanity that others like to ignore. I think to dismiss art made by artists who are immoral by whatever semi-arbitrary standards for morality we've created and accepted is synonymous with rejecting a large portion of what it means to be human. And as many philosophers have pointed out, humanity may not be some divine creation and, in fact, we're probably much more beast-like than we'd like to admit.

I have to draw the line at Birth of a Nation, whatever its merits.

Roger Ebert wrote the best review on the film I've seen yet: HERE

Best quotes:

He achieved what no other known man has achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.

These words by James Agee about D. W. Griffith are almost by definition the highest praise any film director has ever received from a great film critic. On the other hand, the equally distinguished critic Andrew Sarris wrote about Griffith's masterpiece: "Classic or not, 'Birth of a Nation' has long been one of the embarrassments of film scholarship. It can't be ignored...and yet it was regarded as outrageously racist even at a time when racism was hardly a household word."

...

Certainly "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) presents a challenge for modern audiences. Unaccustomed to silent films and uninterested in film history, they find it quaint and not to their taste. Those evolved enough to understand what they are looking at find the early and wartime scenes brilliant, but cringe during the postwar and Reconstruction scenes, which are racist in the ham-handed way of an old minstrel...

To understand "The Birth of a Nation" we must first understand the difference between what we bring to the film, and what the film brings to us. All serious moviegoers must sooner or later arrive at a point where they see a film for what it is, and not simply for what they feel about it. "The Birth of a Nation" is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s “The Triumph of the Will,” it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.

Would you enjoy reading an incredibly well-written fictional story about the molestation of an innocent child that was written by a person with a known history of pedophilia? Say it was written in a "pro-pedophilia" way. (And I'm not talking about Lolita; I'm talking about a person who really has sexually molested children over and over.) Would you praise it? Would you damn it? Or would you simply not read it?

First, I imagine I'd read it - if for no other reason in that, if it was REALLY well written it would give me insight into a mind-set completely alien to me. As for praising/damning, I do believe I could praise the form, the language, the art, while damning the actual content.

Let me put it this way: If art isn't the one place people can be free from societal and cultural standards and morals, then were CAN people be completely free to express themselves about the outside and inside worlds they experience?

[Jozanny]

I wasn't going to add anything here, but Sandman's post just reminded me about what goes around comes around, in relation to the recent controversy over Stiller and Tropic Thunder.

One, I am not a huge fan of Stiller even before this movie, but still, I have read black voices talking back to movie critics about Downey's portrayal in black face really adding nothing to the conversation.

I don't know, but would be sympathetic to a minority voice who couldn't accept Ebert's apologia for a work of art, however pleasing, promoting evil when that evil involves promoting one ethnic group as less than human--again, these issues aren't easy, because I'd be just as uneasy about destroying Nation, or getting rid of Stiller.

I don't like Stiller, but he apparently has his base, and knows enough people to put his brand on the map.

[Kafka's Crow]

I think after some decades or centuries the passage of time makes a writer's biographical details forgotten or even irrelevant. What do we know about Homer's life? As Salman Rushdie said in a Guardian interview in 2003, "Only my book will live, everybody else will die."

Hemingway's reputation is in a downward spiral along with many other major modernists'. This is one of the things that developed in the last two decades. I read The Sun also Rises a couple of months ago. I found it vile. I once loved Hemingway. I think I am growing out of those short sentences and all that counterpointing and repetitions of 'and' and all that lost generation stuff and... and.... Time is doing its work very efficiently. Only time proves the worth of an artist. Unfortunately they all die, leaving behind only their works which float or sink according to the dictates of time. What do you think of Battaile when you read The Story of the Eye, or Lautreamont when your read Les chants de Maldoror? The former has the most unabashed description of adolescents engaged in perverse sexuality I have ever come across whereas the latter has everything in it: murder, blasphemy, pedophilia, bestiality, and much more. Do the works condemn their creators? At the end of all that is said and done, only works survive and they have their own strengths, merits and survival mechanism which is dependent on neither the marketing setup, nor the critical consensus, nor even the academic approval and recommendation. Today we assert that Hemingway's life-style was undesirable. It fitted the 'he-man' ideals of his time which is not relevant now but the works live on. Even if their author is labeled (rightly or wrongly) blood-thirsty or a show-off or even an a£%* hole, still it is the works 'who' are still soldiering on with a force of their own. The real test lies in the fact that how long this force keeps them alive. They might die for us but even then we can't be sure as John Donne's poetry has shown us, artistic creations can go into a hibernation that might last many generations and then wake up with a new vigor to please many generations to come only to go slumbering again. The struggle between art and time is something that we can not predict anything about. We can not look in the future. Time proves everything. Nobody can ever unearth the true story of a work of art. What do we know what really happened in an artist's life, his very private sorrows, his inexplicable joys, his jealousies, his loves and his private demons. They all shape a work of art as much (if not more) as the known biographical details and histories. I think a writer's biographical details are irrelevant. A cult of personality was created around Ernest Hemingway by the marketing forces of his time. They used it to sell books, movies, safari trips and fishing expeditions as well as finer things like certain exquisite drinks or this for me to drool on:
http://www.montblanc.com/37.php
Time, on th e other hand, has no mercy for such fickle schemes. They will be forgotten by the non-specialists sooner or later. What will survive is the merits of his works 'who' will rise and fall and rise and fall again according to their place in history at a given moment. This will go on till the last copy of his last remaining book is moth-eaten and rendered unreadable and art passes on to archeology what was once its own pride and joy. That takes hundreds, even thousands of years. Art is a dedicated parent who fights to save its child till the very end. Artistic creation is like procreation, our only hope against mortality. Reputations and histories only go so far. Art lives on.

[MorpheusSandman]

again, these issues aren't easy, because I'd be just as uneasy about destroying Nation, or getting rid of Stiller.

For me it's fairly easy (in cases like Nation) for separating positives from negatives in the art. I don't see why one can't praise the form - the language, so to speak - and damn what it promotes. I mean Griffith did spend much of his life apologizing for the work, and Intolerance was practically his reaction to the negativity (and actually a better film all around IMO).

[tractatus]

Can a real a@#hole produce great art?

Well, my observations say, if one is male and artist, % 90 he is an @#@#le too. The proportion "% 90" is out of my optimism.


We expect decent/good conduct personality from a religion man, who sells moral. But art is not offering any moral. The output is dirty most of the time, they are works of art not hymns, so what make us to expect an angel personality from the artist.

If we really judging Hemingway here only because of hunting, no, not sufficient. He may count on the 'angel' side.

[hhc]

Everybody loved Gunter Grass' books, didn't they? Until one day he decided to tell us he had been an SS member. A Nazi. A nasty, fascist a##hole.

Yes, a writer does put much of himself in his works, and if he's a terrible human being, some of the rotten part of his personality is going to come out -although this doesn't necessarily always happen. Sometimes there is much more violence in the book of a fanatic peace-lover, than in the autobiography of the most blood-thirsty dictator; more sex in the book of a nun than in the book of a prostitute; and so on.
A writer's biography only tells us what he did, not what he thought.
Sometimes, even things that seem hideous to us now were quite usual and even approved of some years ago. For example, Hemingway's hunting habits.

I believe that
a) it's upon us to show some maturity and read a piece of litterature, just for the sake of art, completely detached from our liking or not liking the writer's way of living,
b) many of the world's great writers were perverts, gamblers, convicts, fascists, snobbish aristocrats, women haters, violent and cynical drunkards, etc. If you wanna read some good litterature, you don't have much of a choice. You will have to read the writings of some very sinful people.