Naughty (People) but Nice (Art) — Part II.
iii. Caveat(s)
After previously rounding off by suggesting that this debate is complex, I hope you’ll excuse me, stranger that I am, for here introducing — and by no means thoroughly resolving — a whirlwind of questions and potential concerns we might have with the allegedly ‘common sense’ conclusions of the preceding ‘moralistic’ argument: the argument against specific acts of art appreciation on ethical grounds.
Yes you fool! That’s right! I don’t believe in this moralistic stance (if only I myself were as slippy as that argumentative turn, I would be snared by you initially, no doubt, seized like a freshly caught fish, but I would be so slippery that I would wriggle right out from your fingers, and I would be of such a size that I would flop away and slide down the drain, and I would make my home there, and it would be cold and it would be dark and it would be damp but at least it would be mine).
Anyway. These questions and concerns which follow should collectively suggest to you that simply distancing ourselves (i.e. refraining from behaviours like appreciation, interpretation, and praise) from good art made by bad people isn’t always an easy route, nor a desirable outcome.
And remember, this is not a question of whether artists should suffer (less dramatically, face consequences) for their actions. I have absolutely no issue, generally speaking (and with all the usual niceties in mind) with chastising someone for the character they possess and make manifest.
The question is whether, in virtue of an artist’s ethical failings, the art should ‘suffer’, or, if we were to swerve any anthropomorphism, whether we should consume a cultural artefact — a piece of art — whose creator is of the just mentioned character.
iv. Some Bits that Might Need Answering
What might be some of the things to swill over before we set off on the great purge of things to read and see and listen to?
First off, it’s fairly obvious that not all vices are made equal. Even if we are converging, as suggested earlier, on some outline of a universal moral framework (shaky though it may be), there is still plenty of debate, often inter and intra-cultural in nature, about what constitutes a hanging offence (or a ‘substantial moral shortcoming’) and what doesn’t.
Does narcissism count? If so, what level must it reach? Is this form of exaggerated self-love more of a Judeo-Christian sin than any fully fledged moral err? Without clarity here, or a globally recognised Dante-esque hierarchy of bad stuff, it’s difficult to establish general principles about just when and just where that immoral line is properly crossed, a line which signifies that we should stop engaging with someone’s art.
Relatedly, it’s fairly self-evident that even our well-entrenched moral beliefs alter over time. Prudish fears surrounding homoerotic literature or heavy metal now have different genres and objects — from grime music to racially diverse families in Sainsbury’s adverts — to take as their targets of loathing. Now, I agree, you’d have to be warped to take issue with these items just listed, so the individuals doing all the loathing are not the default arbiters of right or wrong.
But let’s play Devil’s advocate and suggest that we, right in this moment, are effective judges of moral conduct. Looking back, history — and by that I mean, those who comprise it — is full of the vile and the reprehensible. And it’s clear that art is not created in a vacuum. Should we excuse past artists who fall short of today’s ethical standards? If so, how far back must one have existed, how great a chronological distance must there be, in order to get a free pass? And how much historical documentation do we require in order to form these opinions of historical artists, opinions which permit us to chastise (or praise) them? Are these demands too much for the ‘everyday aesthete’?
And this tendency for values to fluctuate leaves us with questions about the future, too. Who is to say what moral norms will prevail in a world where a planet can no longer sustain animals as livestock, or where melting icecaps don’t loom as existential threat, but now cover once fertile lowlands? Will the output of a voracious present-day meat-eater or petrolhead ‘rock’ icon be something we can no longer enjoy a couple of generations down the line?
Alongside this, we shouldn’t forget that when we decide to no longer engage with an artwork we’re usually impacting more than one individual. Other actors sharing a stage, other musicians, producers, engineers, co-authors, editors, teams of sculptors, graphic designers. What about the ethically unproblematic others — and maybe not just ‘ethically unproblematic’, but the very victims of the problematic artist themselves — who have, in some ways (some big, some small), poured (parts of) their lives into a work?
If you’ve got the stomach for further open-ended questions we can now turn to bear in mind the transient, fluid nature of each individual. After all, people do grow (or shrink) in all senses, including the ethical — and it’s a relatable empirical fact that many of us remain ashamed of past behaviours, and retain the memory of them, to be taken upon ourselves as catalyst for change.
I am not for a moment saying that the simple potentiality of change (and redemption) should be an excuse for an artist (and their art) in the present. But we can’t rule out the notion that someone, especially those who have been in the grip of addiction or mental illness, might do enough of a U-turn to be considered, now, sufficiently moral — what then?
Must we cease to appreciate — and again, the negation of appreciation should here be understood as disengagement, censorship, or even protest — pieces of art from earlier, more ethically troubled periods of an artists life, but at the same time be able to enjoy their works that came about in different, personal circumstances? Or can a complete reversal in their character, somewhat of a shift towards saintliness, mean that even those previous works, the ones who temporally co-existed with moral failing after moral failing, are cleansed, scrubbed up, and ready to be sought out?
And, even semi-parking all these complex hypotheticals, is there something, something about the need for a well documented history — a well documented artist — and the facing forwards as well as facing backs, the ‘wait-a-minute’s, the thresholds, the ‘who-else-was-involved’s, the clarity of moral principles to judge people by, is there something about all of this which just seems intuitively opposed, maybe even inherently opposed, to how we actually go about reading, looking at, or listening to art?
v. I Reckon
I don’t have anything resembling a concrete answer to how we should navigate this dilemma nor the minefield of questions which compound it. I think adhering to the moralistic view introduced earlier is a too restrictive, and when taken to its logical extent it produces too many unwanted consequences. In the same vein, I’m not happy with unfettered engagement with art, I think the ethical has to be addressed in some form. But there might be something which is a bit like a happy medium available.
I think as much as we like to talk about universal principles of good (or bad) behaviour and good (or bad) art we have to remember that, on some very core level, everything is mediated by, through, the individual. No matter how objective we attempt to be, there’s an indestructible element of subjectivity in how all stimuli is received, and all lived experience formed and enacted.
Morally speaking, what is, say, abuse in one instance is quite easily exhausting perfectionism in another. Jean Cocteau’s description of Erik Satie captures this pithily: “Egotistic, cruel, obsessive, he listened to nothing that did not subscribe to his dogma and flew into violent tempers with those who opposed it. Egotistic, because he thought of nothing but his music. Cruel, because he defended his music. Obsessive, because he went on polishing his music. And his music was tender. So was he, in his own way.”
Aesthetically speaking, and following similar reasoning, what is a refreshing lack of punctuation in one novel is a cheap and poorly executed attempt at subversion in another. So, whether we like it or not, it (somewhat) falls down to us to decide — and I mean, at least at the final hurdle, ‘us’ as solitary individuals, not ‘us’ as collective — whether or not we engage with a piece of art.
And so what I think you must do, if you care about where your art comes from, is perform a little mental calculation, a calculation where the two sums involved — let’s say, ethical character of artist on the one side, and aesthetic merit of the work on the other — are pinned down and the resulting measurement is taken.
This is a balancing act where you, to the best of your abilities, try and weigh up these opposing values — values which themselves are naturally composed of some metrics (about what makes a person or piece of art ‘good’, respectively) which you adhere to.
An application of your (no doubt limited, fractured, and incomplete— let’s all be modest) understanding of an individual’s moral rights and wrongs and the aesthetic goods and bads of their work. Then, depending on how much of a surplus or deficit of overall value is left, a decision on how you can — if at all — relate, or continue to relate, to this piece of art.
For the purposes only of illustration (and to be supremely reductionist) this might go something like: on evaluation this work X has an aesthetic value of 67.3/100. The pretty awful bloke who made it scores, based on my evaluations, a 24.2/100 on the ‘good-person-o-meter’. My standard threshold for engagement is 95/200 and this here gives us 91.5/200, and that’s just not quite good enough.
And before you start, I know that this precisely quantified style of calculating is fraught with its own issues. Thinking like this might mean that a really, truly lovely person who was nonetheless an absolutely abysmal artist would bring about a score, a situation, where we were compelled to engage with their work on principle. This seems both unintuitive and undesirable. Working in reverse generates a similar outcome, surely at some stage, no matter how good the recording or architecture is, a specific degree or type of moral flaw must, I presume (and am yet to experience the contrary to this presumption) annihilate our ability or reasons to engage.
What I’m trying to here crystallise is not an easy formula for an ethics-based mode of aesthetic appreciation, but a mode of thinking which is far more natural when you don’t ascribe numbers to it, and which, I believe, is the sort of thinking a lot of us do anyway, even if more subconscious than any lucid cousin. No, you don’t need a notepad, and no, you don’t need to make a spreadsheet (haven’t you got enough already?).
Doing these little sums, for me, gets the right results, results I’m comfortable with and can justify straight-faced, autonomous, and without any cognitive dissonance reverberating in the background. Calculated thinking allows us to continue enjoying Guernica despite Picasso’s poor character, and gives me personally enough moral justification to never listen to anything that fat abuser from Kasabian coke shits out.
Does this mean I am willing to take the quality of Guernica as a form of atonement? No, I don’t think so. But the aesthetic value of the painting might still preserve the need for attention, interpretation, engagement and even praise — not directed so much at the creator but, when things get morally sticky, the creation. The art comes to exist in the face of the artist’s poor ethical character, it exists in spite of our dissatisfaction with their conduct.
Not only do I consider these mental calculations necessary if you are concerned about ethics, I also think that these brief conscientious pauses, moments of collection and consideration, could on occasion enhance our aesthetic experiences. And if even this, reasoned (yet semi-off the cuff and naturalistic) mode of thought is still a bit too ‘beige’ for what you consider to be art engagement and appreciation, then I must ask why you think everything should come freely.
