Today's post will be relatively brief because I'm down with the infamous Con Crud, but I do want to expand on something I posted on Twitter regarding the Renaming Craze.
Similarly: Creatives often have skeletons in their closets. Recognizing them for their professional contributions - by, say, naming awards after them - does not in fact represent approval of their politics or their personal sins.
— Stephanie Souders (@TheRightGeek) August 29, 2019
Let's just pull up an artist at random: Pablo Picasso. Picasso, quite frankly, treated the women in his life like dogshit. He was constitutionally unable to be faithful and as a consequence indirectly drove two of his lovers to suicide. Should we now storm every museum on Earth that exhibits his work and demand that those paintings be taken down and destroyed?
And what of the actors and writers in Hollywood who were devoted Communists long after that was even remotely forgivable? What of those creatives who were all for fighting against the emergent menace of Nazi Germany until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (after which they immediately switched gears like good little Stalinist puppets)? Do we need to sack our movie archives? Have ourselves a little bonfire of the reels?
This whole notion that artists must be stainless for their cultural contributions to be honored is destructive nonsense. Pursued to its logical conclusion, it will result in the razing of our entire patrimony. Why? Because, as I said at the start, artists are (often) dicks. Historically, there seems to be a strong correlation between six-sigma genius and mental disturbance/eccentricity/cross-grained political enthusiasms/horrifying private sins. That's why, until five minutes ago, we've always tried to separate the creative from his work.
Let's get back to that old regime, please. It's far more sane.
None of us are saints, least of all those calling themselves "artists". If I only consumed the art of people who weren't "problematic" for this reason or that, I'd be spending my day sitting alone in a room staring at a blank wall. Even then, I'm not sure the wall isn't a tool of the patriarchy. It's clown world, no matter how you look at it.
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