| Note: this started as a super brief comment and then expanded into a missive because I was interrupted by a call with an artist friend and two glasses of wine, and then didn't want to throw it away. TLDR: can we really trust the work product of untrustworthy ("bad") people? --- I know it sounds rational to enjoy the works of "geniuses" even if they were horrible people. I just have trouble with it. Like, even using JavaScript which was invented by a homophobe, rubs me the wrong way, as it were :) Even though I kinda like the language itself for fun/easy hacking. Or take Schopenhauer whose stuff about music is inspiring to me. Dude was a gross incel though. Or take Wagner's anti-semitism. Encountering facts like that just makes me wonder what other kinds of defects or oversights could be hiding in their works. Belief in the virtue of punching down just doesn't feel the same qualitatively as other vices like addictions or whatever. It seems worse, "evil"? I would trust the average drunken poet or painter or junkie musician more than any iconoclast or figure who seems to be inspired by the muses of unfair living for other people only. Excepting of course legitimate satire or criticism. If you have to rely on extremist or violent ideas in order to create something useful or beautiful, it actually comes off as pitiful. I guess it's not that art needs to be harmonious or symmetrical or pure or "good", but that to be trustworthy and useful for insight, I feel more comfortable knowing that its creator was somehow loving and inclusive. On top of it, I think if you are considered a genius that the bar must be higher not to fail at basic respect for others. Geniuses are ostensibly smart after all, so defects like discrimination, opposition to equal opportunity, or any form of hatred (except maybe self-hatred) just feels disqualifying from a user experience standpoint. For every Feynman or Schopenhauer or Wagner there are tons of equal or better geniuses who might not be in the right place at the right time, or don't make a lot of noise, mainly because of inequality. One of my favourite commentators, Stephen Fry, a gay man of Jewish descent, even defended Wagner's art, which I find extremely conflicted. I wish I could achieve that level of liberty in criticism. All of that said, I think also that just creating anything at all comes with some amount of good built-in. Nature is brutal too and it makes all kinds of beautiful and useful things quite by accident. The difference in critique and judgement only seems to arise if the creator is sentient. |
To me this sounds as if you now need to search for issues on a piece was already deemed good; in a way this is a fallacy. Wagner was a great artist, is his music antisemitic? Doesn’t sound logical. You could perhaps argue that there might be some latent risk in his music expanding values that can create a basis for antisemitism; to me all that sounds just like justification.
In the extreme: is a math theorem less true when done by awful people? There must be some truth and some value on their works.