Do we separate the art from the artist?

When someone breaks our moral code, it’s tempting to dismiss them and their life’s work.

This is especially so if they have committed an egregious offence against society, done something terrible, which cannot be forgiven.

In today’s media climate, that will often happen before any legal processes have been concluded. There would be an exposé revealing a series of incidents, involving victims sharing their experiences. The revelation that the offending person was not who they appeared to be, that they were living a double life of depravity concealed by a hypocritical veneer of respectability.

For most of us, who follow a try-hard existence of work, family and private life, being accused of something would mean allowing the legal processes to follow their course, and then accepting the consequences. Paying our debt to society, whether that means loss of work, fines, jail time, or excommunication from our industry.

For those of us active in the creative sector, the artists, the celebrities and influencers, there is another sanction: getting cancelled. On social media, this essentially means rejecting, dismissing and boycotting an artist’s entire body of work.

Cancel culture takes the view that an artist’s work is inseparable from the person who created it. That violations by the person irreparably sully their work, rendering it toxic, and as offensive as its creator.

One can understand this point of view. Especially because in today’s era of social media-driven celebrity culture, the work and the artist start to fuse. We may, for instance, listen to someone’s music, but we will also follow them on Instagram and Twitter, and experience their everyday lives through their own curated posts. We feel like we  know them. It’s disappointing when they let us down.

Even if an artist is not a social media maven who lives their status as an influencer, we still develop relationships with our faves, our favourite artists and celebrities, relationships that are closer to friendship than the slightly outdated concept of “being a fan”.

We may Stan, sure, perform the attitude of obsessing over an artist or a celebrity, but in fact, we have more personal relationships with artists these days than we have ever had before. We can access pics and clips from their daily lives, we can watch video blogs where they speak to camera, as if to us. We can like their posts and, if we’re lucky, and they’re feeling open, we can chat. They might retweet one of our posts! Oh, the Stan-ship!

In the Age of the Influencer, in which we now operate, that social media profile is sometimes all there is to a celebrity. The social media presence is no strategy, no public relations, no outreach to promote the work. The social media IS the work!

All well and good. But what happens when someone does produce work for public consumption. They’re an artist, a musician, a filmmaker, an actor, a director, a television personality.

But when they stumble, when the objects of our affection sin against others, against society, do they deserve to be cancelled? Should the work be punished as much as the perpetrator?

I believe our work is often an expression of the best side of us, the produce of the better angels of our nature. In this sense, imagine if a musician is accused, and later convicted, of sexual abuse, say. Let’s imagine they are found to be a rapist. And jailed for it. For life!

Are they cancelled? 

As people, probably. That person will surely never eat lunch in town again. They may not be able to show their face in their industry as long as they live.

But the work? Does the work follow its creator’s career down the toilet of history?

You can make a case that it should, particularly if it advocates, or supports the same unethical behaviour the perpetrator is guilty of. Or if it is used to groom fans and followers for exploitation…

Another reason might be that the work is hypocritical. It is songs about love, but the star has been found to be an abuser. Do we cancel the love songs for hypocrisy, that most egregious sin of our age?

Or are those love songs the offender’s best, greatest, most aspiring attempt at goodness? The greatest work of an imperfect, corrupted person? A shot at redemption?

Do we conduct ethics audits of every artist we’re exposed to before deciding whether to follow their work? No. We follow the work that excites us. We are inspired by it, we take ideas and motivation from it that are almost all our own, far removed, even, from the original intentions of the artist.

Is it fair, then, to reject someone’s entire body of work because of what they’ve done, even if they are entirely guilty? That they’ve been caught. What about those who have not been caught?

Do we reject the artistic output of every artist who does not conform to the emerging values of contemporary society? Bear in mind that to do that properly, we would need to throw out the work of most men who were adults before the year 2000, and most white people. Anyone who was ever abusive! God, that probably applies to today’s artists too. 

If we do that, do we not impoverish society? Rob ourselves of some of our most compelling artistic heritage?

Artists are volatile people, sometimes almost possessed by their own creativity. Many of them are not particularly nice people to hang around with. A lot of artists are assholes.

We don’t have to hang around them, though. We can just consume their art, the fruit of that sliver of themselves that reflects greatness, the glory of what we could be, the best part of our possible selves. We can be inspired by their best work. And ignore their failings as humans.

We can, but the thing is, the minute you know about the person behind the art, it affects how you consume it. It’s hard to be inspired by an asshole.

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