I has this happen with the fifth element. I found out Luc Besson is a pedophile who has gotten multiple young girls pregnant. Including a 15 year old he started seeing when she was 13, who he left when she turned 21. The movie is so different knowing about him and his views & it really changes how i watch the movie. Its no longer a fun feel good movie for me. Especially because two of his young wives star in the film.

Death of the author means you separate the art from the artist, and sometimes it also means you wish they were dead

It’s sort of frustrating to me when someone says they liked something and immediately someone just says “blah person involved is an abuser.” It feels so smug.

For me, Salvador Dali’s work transformed from fascinating into kitsch when I learned he was a fascist.

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Ok really tangential rant here!

I find societal attitudes to art and morality really crazy.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the idea that art and morality should be linked, but it only ever seems to happen in a negative capacity of “don’t listen to x because they did y”.

There’s a whole strain of:

• Artists who are not necessarily bad people, but whose art is aggresively immoral (I guess an obvious example would be Biggie Smalls or someone who frequently raps about sexual assault and violence in a positive way, but also the ammount of mainstream pop or country that has sexist or racist undertones)
• Artists who try hard to inject their morality into their work (such as Becky Chambers’ climate positive fiction, or Giancinto Scelsi’s anti-facist music)

On the whole, I don’t see anyone care very much about the above two points, people just “like what they like”, which is as if we think morality and art are two seperate things.

That makes sense, but then there’s this wierd category where “oh that person did this bad thing, so now their art is invalid”.

So, what’s the overall attitude? Like, art isn’t related to morality generally, but there’s some mysterious line where if it’s crossed art moves into the “forbidden zone”?

I’m all for calling bad people to account for their moral behaviour, but the way we do it in art is so jumbled and inconsistent.

I think it’s hard to appreciate something once I start disrespecting the author. My favourite director, Kusturica, ended up a Putin lackey and since then I’ve lost the motivation to see his works.

Not that I would condemn anyone else for watching, just that his movies died a bit for me.

I guess it depends for me. I love Roald Dahl, both his children’s and his adult’s work, even though he was a virulent antisemite (even the museum dedicated to him comes right out and says it). My dad, who was super-sensitive to that stuff, was okay reading his books to me when I was a kid despite that.

And I think the reason why is that he didn’t let his beliefs leak into his work. I can’t look back at any of his works that I have read and see any hatred of Jews.

On the other hand, there’s someone like Woody Allen (Jewish connection not intended here) who you can see his awful shit in his movies. He’s literally dating a high school student in his film Manhattan. And he treats her like shit and basically gets away with it too.

I can’t watch Woody Allen movies anymore.