On dead artists
And the social act of art criticism.
(10 minute read)Here's a still life: a famous artist is embroiled in scandal. Two fans of their work discuss. One declares: "that's the line, I can't enjoy their art anymore!" The other replies: "you have to separate the art from the artist."
John Wayne. Kanye West. J.K. Rowling. Kevin Spacey. Bill Cosby. Woody Allen. The list only grows. This small drama plays out thousands of times a day in forums, text chains, and viral social media posts. The famous are brought low by their harmful conduct, their public image shatters, and their fans convene in an emergency session to make sense of the pieces. How are we supposed to respond to artists and their work when this happens? Responses vary, but the conversation very regularly turns to combat.
And I think that's worth exploration. At its core, the discussion around artists' work in light of their actions is twofold:
- It is an exercise in art criticism, an attempt to evaluate and interpret one or more pieces of art.
- It is also an exercise in art theory, a discussion of the methods of art criticism.
The truth of it is that even seasoned, callous-handed academics haven't quite gotten to the bottom of this question either. There are dozens of schools of thought, the last hundred years of art criticism is a cratered landscape of schisms. Still, the state of the craft is such that formalist critical methods — postmodernism, New Criticism, structuralism, reader-response — present less like churches and more like lenses. They're a set of tools used by contemporary perspectives to help deconstruct, recontextualize, and ultimately understand art; given the current state of global politics, it goes without saying that it's still very much a battleground. Art criticism is a slow and complicated march pressing onward since classical antiquity, and the comments-section-belowfolk never stood a chance.
Of course, that means I don't stand a chance either. But I'll take a stab at it.
A failure to relate
If art criticism is a social act, then any stripe of formalism would have Sisyphean difficulty outside of universities and art institutions. The world happens in context. The lion's share of art is made in that world. Formalism attempts to evaluate art in a self-contained, self-sufficient manner and that sort of analysis rarely leads to productive discussion without cordoning off a controlled environment for it. Academia, mostly.
People broadly, though, don't have much interest in suspending their human experience when grappling with art. Their reactions to art are made possible and even elevated by that experience. Art criticism, then, becomes the method through which people reveal how they think, how they feel, all in an effort to relate to another person. The primary objective of art criticism, for the majority of people, is to relate.
That dialogue, I submit, will always be in tension. On one hand is the evaluation of art through the viewer's ethical stance; that stance might be ecocriticism, feminism, critical race theory or even nationalism, chauvinism, and religious fundamentalism. The value of art is the difference between the artwork's apparent intent and the viewer's personal morality, plus the delta of however much the art shifts the viewer's perspective one way or another. On the opposite hand, art is evaluated based on personal taste, the viewer having a solid grasp of the aesthetic principles to which they respond most strongly.
People don't tend to be purists; they prioritize the perspective of one of these camps over the other when evaluating art and sometimes this prioritization isn't consistent from artwork to artwork. And that's more than fine, not every art conversation needs to be held up to academic scrutiny.
Disagreement on the merits of an artwork can happen along ethical fault lines, personal aesthetics, or both. But all versions of this disagreement are attempts to socialize. They always had little to do with art and everything to do with trying to establish a connection. People want to feel heard, their thoughts and feelings validated or at least acknowledged. People don't like rejection, don't like having their thoughts dismissed as stupid and not worth the oxygen to explore, and don't like being cut down to a lower moral rung. Difficult, complicated, and even combative dialogue can happen between friends, its weight supported by an underlying relationship. Between two strangers, it's a more fraught endeavor, and it's this latter case that appears in spades on the open Internet.
And so art criticism in conflict becomes a thinly-veiled substitute for people criticism. It's just so much easier to escalate language against art rather than against another person, but the dialogue still bears frustration and indignation for the flimsiness of that substitution. Bringing a beloved piece of art up for discussion just to have it rejected tends to feel like a personal attack and that induces an elbows-up defensive response. Eventually the argument wanders hopelessly into the weeds where no amount academic language can save it, then the veneer abrades entirely and it's each person's character that's on trial.
Pejoratives fly. Upvotes to the left. Get ratioed.
The author never dies
All that being said, I'll now hazard the following conclusion: there is no such thing as the death of the author.
I take it as axiomatic that when art is created, it bears some insight into its creator. Art theory and art criticism offer tools with which I can investigate meaning and intention to the best of my ability, even though have to admit that no analysis could ever recover artistic intention perfectly. And that's entirely aside from any unintended new meaning art assumes as its received by the world, a new life created through distortions, differences, and the global moment.
Of course, my analysis can turn out to be dead-wrong; either new information comes out that further illuminates previous knowns or I can choose to change my footing through constructive dialogue. But exploring that gray area, that uncertainty, is the practice of art criticism and perhaps even appreciation. In acknowledging context rather than ignoring it, criticism is more insightful and appreciation deepens.
Make no mistake, I'm still highly opinionated when it comes to aesthetics. But just as art is created in context, artists also exist in context. Their art confronts me with their perspective, and as the audience my engagement is to some degree my attempt to relate. When it comes to artists that have exacted knowing or irreparable harm against other people, I have no interest in relating to their experience and my enjoyment of their art suffers.
Especially now that skeletons have been falling out of all kinds of closets over the past decade, it sometimes happens that a favorite artist of mine has their sins laid bare and aesthetic grounds alone are just not enough to enjoy their work anymore. I can't ever un-know what I come to learn, and my opinion changes in light of new information. If the truth turns out to be catastrophic, I can only mourn the loss and then seek out other artists with whom I can relate better and — in some small way — trust more.
Some artists can rebound from their past indiscretions; my evaluation may be more positive but it can never be the same. Or it may stay negative for having crossed a hard line, it's ultimately up to me to decide for myself. In the art world, and in life broadly, part of accountability is to accept that others may now close doors that can never be reopened, then making peace with that by suppressing the urge to pry the door back open, and then further opting to make better choices moving forward. Others are buried without ever making things right, and so their ability to actively influence their own work is forfeit. For others still, there are actions that close all doors, and there is nothing that can be done to wash that away.
Sidelining the artist, their past conduct, their current conduct, the circumstances under which they create, their stated beliefs, the dissonance of those beliefs in practice, all it does is deny a complete perspective of their work.
Put another way: to separate the art from the artist is to ignore a critical part of their art.
"Dog"
It's worth mentioning that acknowledging the value of art is not the same as enjoying it. It's more than possible to engage with art, to appreciate it, without applauding its aesthetics or praising its message.
I will acknowledge that Cormac McCarthy is a venerated author, that his narratives are distinguished for their bleakness and simple yet crushing prose. He also groomed a minor and I can't not bring this into my perspective on his work; that fact will always and forever inform my understanding of his writing. At the same time there are antisocial specimens such as:
Dog I don't care this dude wrote genius books I'm not gonna not read a masterpiece.
Am I frustrated by this? Yes, because it's dismissive of the issue at hand, it's a perspective that requires blinders to enjoy art, and it wholesale rejects that criticism of the author is worth consideration when forming opinions about the work. It furthermore jumps the shark by presuming that any criticism of McCarthy's conduct is intended to guilt the Redditor out of reading his books.
Bluntly: dog, nobody cares that you read McCarthy. The thread is discussing his conduct, and it baffles me that someone so bent on not discussing his conduct is throwing their hat in the ring proclaiming their disinterest in the topic. Would I ever take the time to wade into this thread? Absolutely not, because it's a take, not a conversation. Even if there were a way to drag the thread in a more positive direction, there's not much to trust without rapport.
Ultimately, I'm biased, they're biased, and the conversation is best served without cladding it in pseudo-objective language. Try as we may, nobody is objective about art, so we ought to drop the pretense of objectivity for a moment so we can better understand each other as people first then draw our conclusions after.
I don't need to be convinced to consider a piece of art; I'll consider anything that's in front of me. But I will not accept that monstrous acts committed by its creator are just a contrived obstacle standing in the way of my own enjoyment.
Art criticism — at its best — is a conversation between strange, flawed, and unique people about strange, flawed, and unique people. Only when we accept that of ourselves and of each other can we have a conversation worth having. I'm all ears.
