When the MeToo movement took off across the globe in 2017, it changed how we think about artists and their art.
As victims of sexual harassment and assault spoke out, the public became more aware of the behaviour of well-known people, including successful artists. Audiences immediately began to view these artists’ work through the lens of their actions.
As a result, many of our favourite books, songs and art works became irrevocably tainted by the transgressions of their creators.
Admiring the work of Pablo Picasso — the cubist artist who burned his partner Françoise Gilot’s face with a cigarette (and painted it) — or Alfred Hitchcock — the film director who tried to destroy actress Tippi Hedren’s career when she rebuffed his advances — became a less straightforward proposition.
“In the aftermath [of MeToo], people were left wondering what to do about their heroes,” US critic Claire Dederer writes in her new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
Now this is a good debate.
Personally, my view is that it is inappropriate to hold people from past generations to modern value systems, as the rational basis of those modern values did not exist yet.
We only expect human rights because we have ancestors that fought for them. Before the conflicts became commonplace, part of being a “good” person was to behave differently. We should not think that we are somehow special and would behave any differently than our ancestors, had we been nurtured in that time, surrounded by only those antiquated ideas.
This is why Genghis Khan and Hitler should be seen in a different light. They were both butchers, but the Khan was a butcher in a time of butchers. Where Hitler did it in a time of industrialization and the rise of globalization. One of the men is a respected historical figure of great relevance, the other is despised as one of the most evil men in history. Not for different actions, though, but for doing the same actions in different contexts, in worlds of different expectations.
We also need to note the time difference. Khan lived 8 centuries ago and hitler only 1. Hitler is more fresh in our minds and his memory will fade like Khan and the many others before him. How many people know of the atrocities that Assyria committed thousands of years ago? Hitler won’t be seen as nearly as evil in say 3500 because they will most likely have someone from the 3300s or 3400s who they see as evil and want to not repeat the actions of. Khan may have lived in “a time of butchers” but people then also saw his actions as atrocities. We aren’t that much better than other periods of history really we just see our selves that way because that’s where we live and we don’t see the day to day experiences of people hundreds or even thousands of years ago and only hear about wars and battles and what empire raped the other worse.
I would argue that while yes, they were recognized as atrocities, there was still a common expectation that massacres could and would happen during wartime. As a result of this general expectation, the Khan was never really looked at in any different light from those Assyrians you mentioned.
Hitler, however, behaved quite differently from his contemporaries. Only Stalin was quite that bloody. This illustrates a clear difference of the changing standards of the time, further reinforced by things like mass literacy and rapid communication of news.
To say that humans haven’t changed requires ignoring a great deal of relative peace and prosperity. While we will likely never be done 100% completely with atrocities of different natures, simply reducing how common they are is an accomplishment that should not be ignored.
We should not make heroes. People are falible, don’t idolize them. You can of course still admire their work.
This is harder with artists though. They put more of themselves in their work and once you know an artist was an absolute cunt you can start seeing things in their art that you didn’t before or experiencing it differently and don’t like it anymore.
But if you still enjoy their work I think that’s fine too. Especially if they are dead and can’t profit from it, if they would profit from it I, personally, just pirate it and that keeps my conscience clean.
But if you still enjoy their work I think that’s fine too. Especially if they are dead and can’t profit from it, if they would profit from it I, personally, just pirate it and that keeps my conscience clean.
This is pretty close to something I’ve been saying for a while now in regards to the whole ActivisionBlizzard sexual misconduct thing any time someone brings up separating the art from the artist. You can easily do that with a book or a movie simply by going to a local library. And for many games through piracy like you said.
For a live service game like World of Warcraft there is no real way to experience it without supporting them, either monetarily or in their precious monthly active users metric they switched to after they stopped reporting on subscriber counts. In that kind of case the only real option is to walk away.
For a live service game like World of Warcraft there is no real way to experience it without supporting them, either monetarily or in their precious monthly active users metric they switched to after they stopped reporting on subscriber counts. In that kind of case the only real option is to walk away.
Aren’t there still private servers available, or did they get those taken down via lawsuits/threats of lawsuits? Or did they kinda fade out after classic WoW became an official option? Regardless, you’re right that with most live service games the only real option is to quit outright.
I’m sure they probably are still around, and would probably be decent for someone new to experience the content for themselves in an ethical way. But going that route for a long time player means giving up your current character that you’ve invested a lot of time into and any guild friend groups you are part of just so you can go play an approximation of an older version of the game. At that point it starts seeming like an addiction to me. Better to let the past go and seek out new experiences elsewhere.
I wrote in another commenr:
People with creative minds are more likely to push societal boundaries instead of just being happy in 9-5 jobs.
You want to call out and cancel every artist that’s not the ideal person, enjoy your white walls for entertainment.
I’m not gonna downvote you (yet) because maybe I’m not getting your point right, and I think you didn’t get mine which was the exact opposite to your third paragraph. I meant that no one’s perfect, and when you idolize them you create expectation that no one can match so sooner or later they’ll going to let you down.
Now not being perfect or ‘pushing societal boundaries’, which many would argue is one of the purposes or even a requirement of art, is not the same as being a complete piece of shit. I’m not supporting with my hard earned money or with publicity anyone who I know is gonna use it to abuse others, or to scam, or rapists… but I hope these where not the kind of ‘creative minds’ you were talking about, are they?
I don’t disagree with you, I just thought I’ll add my point too.
You can boycott anyone and anything for any reason of course. I have my own peeves as well.
But I don’t think it’s good for society to just declare somebody so bad, that all of their personality, art and work has to be completely dismissed. When you’re looking at a random painting or movie, you simply can’t know what’s behind it anyway. What would you do if you found that 99 of your top 100 movies were made by serial killers? And it’s not just about art. Everything in modern society - technology, politics, medical science - has been shaped by suffering, and it still is.
People are complex creatures, both individually and as a society. We are all capable of insanely shitty things in circumstances. We can acknowledge that and include that knowledge in our future endeavour. Or we can cancel and erase bad things from history and invite them from happening again.
Btw this is my original comment where I took that bit from.
I like your points. The only part I think that could still be debated is definition of an artist. Actors and singers are considered by many to be artists (though of course the definition of artist is subjective), and we are far more likely to recognize them in their art than we probably are to recognize, say, a painter or sculptor, thus making it harder not to idolize them as artists.
But I still agree with you.
People love to see things and the world as black and white. In fairytales, the good people were always beautiful and flawless, and the bad people were always ugly and hateful. (Unless the story was deliberately about those stereotypes.)
And we still expect the world to be like that.
But it’s not. People aren’t even just good or bad. And even those “bad” people can do amazing things. Werner von Braun, a full-blown nazi, got us to the moon. Serial killers on death row have made scientific discoveries. Some eras and genres of music are barely anything else than drug trips where tons of people were hurt.
That’s just how it is. That book, song, movie you’re enjoying, wasn’t written by a flawless ethereal being. In fact, it probably wasn’t, because people with creative minds are more likely to push societal boundaries instead of just being happy in 9-5 jobs.
You want to call out and cancel every artist that’s not the ideal person, enjoy your white walls for entertainment.
Besides, before cancelling someone, you know how it works - throw the first stone…
And also, whatever gets exposed is only the tip of the iceberg. Entire industries, creative or not, are built on suffering of some kind.
If you decide to boycott someone or something, that’s always your choice, but don’t expect me to follow you, or be mad at me when I don’t. Otherwise I’m gonna ask you what you plan to do with that phone built by child slaves.
The answer is pretty simple. Continue enjoying the art, but cut them off from any profits from it.
Where do you draw the line between cutting off profits and not? If somebody did only smaller crimes, do we cut only some profits?
I don’t get this reasoning. Either we can admit that people can do both good and bad things, and good and bad art, or we can keep doing all these cancellations until nobody has anything.
Ed: also who gets those profits then, they corporations owning the IPs?
I’m not sure exactly who said it, but I like the phrase, “acknowledge the artist, appreciate the work.”