One place where everyone has to set their own boundaries is where you separate the art from the artist. It’s hard for me to remember that sometimes, because I want to start shouting every time people praise Tom Cruise or Woody Allen. (Neither of whom, I’ll admit, I liked all that much before I became aware of their unpleasant aspects.) It also seems to me as though society seems to pick people almost at random to become self-righteous about, and others are allowed to go about their lives as though they’ve never beaten a spouse or used slave labour to remodel their house.
Sometimes, it’s easier than others to make the distinction. I think it’s probably easiest for acting. Actors are playing roles. I wouldn’t say that they put nothing of themselves into their roles, and of course TV shows are often written based on actors’ personas, but when you’re used to seeing someone play a wide range of other people, it’s harder to be passionate about the person they really are, who you’ve never met anyway. Of course you can separate that art from that artist; there’s no connection between them from a lot of people’s perspectives anyway.
Similarly, I suspect the general public doesn’t care much about directors. I don’t think most people even know what a director does. How can you care what a director has done in life if you aren’t even sure what a director does on the set?
But sometimes, a person’s art is really personal. There’s the old joke about liking Woody Allen movies except for that nervous fellow who’s in all of them, but it’s certainly true that Woody Allen’s personality suffuses his films even when he himself is not actually physically in them. Not only is he in the majority of his films, the humour is of course what Allen finds funny. This can be extremely uncomfortable when contrasted against certain aspects of his personal life.
I think this may be why the nation took the Bill Cosby thing so personally. We’d developed an image of him in our heads. He was a dad. A great dad. A sweet, friendly guy who, yeah, was maybe kind of dorky, but who really wanted the best for his kids. There was also the fact that he was lecturing black people on how to behave if they wanted to stop being poor and mistreated. But that was easy to miss, if you didn’t get information from the right sources.
But then there was the whole “raping drugged women” thing, and how do you reconcile that with Dr. Huxtable? We had a hard time as a nation dealing with the idea that someone we’d respected and whose art we’d enjoyed could possibly be that bad, and so we wanted retribution. We wanted him to pay for that. Those are the two choices, really—either we ignore what you did, or we destroy you. Very seldom is the conversation really “how much do you separate the art from the artist?” That’s just in artistic circles.
How do I do it? I don’t think it’s necessary to do, for one thing. At least not always. There’s a certain amount of “bad person” I’m willing to put up with simply because, if I weren’t, I’d really have to limit the art I consumed. (Though by all accounts, Sir Terry Pratchett was a peach of a guy, so at least I’d still have Discworld.) Also because, honestly, I’m not always convinced I’m that great of a person myself on some levels, and I’d still quite like people to consume my art. (And also support my Patreon.) But I do have a limit, and I think that limit may be where artists start causing serious harm to others.
If you’re just kind of a jerk, well, that’s unpleasant to be around, and I’m not thrilled to know that. But if you’re raping people or beating your spouse or supporting an organization that kills the mentally ill, well, I’m not all that inclined to support your art. Sometimes, the “just kind of a jerk” is in ways that bleeds through into the art stylistically, the way I never thought Woody Allen was funny even before I thought he was vile or the way I find James Franco insufferable. That’s art I avoid. Because it’s art I don’t like.
Your line may be different, and that’s your choice. I mean, even I don’t go tracking down the lives of every artist I care about, and I certainly don’t look into the criminal records of everyone who works on a movie. You could be the rapingest key grip in Hollywood, and I’d never know and I’d never stop watching movies you worked on because of it. But I do think “you should always separate the art from the artist” is insupportable, because the art comes from inside the artist and is informed by who the artist is, and it bleeds through.
