The Artist’s Children

Can a work of art be evil? Do creative endeavors have morals? I have written in this newsletter about my begrudging admiration of Francis Bacon's Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, a painting that never fails to disturb me. I don't enjoy the way that it makes me feel but I am impressed that it elicits such a reaction even after repeated viewings. To do that means that the painting is technically good but is it morally bad for disturbing me? I don't think so. One of the reasons it remains so enigmatic is that I can never quite articulate what it does to me, but it doesn't make me want to do bad things, it doesn't spurn me on to be a worse person. It gets at something deep inside me that I don't want to investigate and then makes me look at it. Is that wrong?

What if its creator, Francis Bacon, were a bad person? Would that make the painting automatically bad? If Bacon beat his lovers, say, or held racist thoughts or was cruel to children, would his paintings have those qualities too? There is no evidence that any of those things were true of Bacon, who had an unhappy childhood but appeared to have enjoyed life despite the grim subjects of his paintings, but would those qualities affect his brushstrokes if they were? Furthermore, did he want me to be disturbed when I looked at his work? Perhaps he thinks his paintings are lovely, does that bear on my reaction? What am I looking at when I look at Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, a painting or the extension of a man?

The French philosopher Roland Barthes was a tireless observer of the way we look at the world. According to Barthes, the myths and gods of ancient Greeks, derided by modern culture as simplistic and childish, are alive and well in today's world. We may not explain thunder as the anger of a god but we use advertising to give products a mythic quality and we honor our cars like Gothic cathedrals. To Barthes, professional wrestling was a source of morality, pitting heroic idealists against dastardly heels, with good coming up on top in the end. We may not have shrines to Apollo or Thor but we have Funko POP dolls of Yoda and tattoos of, well, Thor. "The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters," Barthes wrote.

The issue is that in a mass cultural society we attribute these mythic qualities to real people as well. Homer may never have really existed and we know so little about Shakespeare that much of his personal life is lost to history but today we know the creators as well as their creations. And while Yoda can never let us down, George Lucas most definitely can, as when he made Yoda, who once said "size matters not," jump around like Speedy Gonzales to defend himself against a normal-sized human. How many of us revere Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Lin-Manuel Miranda? In my son's room we have hung portraits of Mark Twain and Hank Aaron (among others). When I say these people are worth admiring aren't I really saying I approve of the court decisions, the music, the literature, the home runs? 

Barthes' most famous essay is called The Death of the Author in which he argues that a piece of work must stand on its own. Once it is created, its creator ceases to be a factor that a critic should take into consideration. Your reaction to it is all that matters. It may be an interesting bit of trivia to know, say, that Richard Linklater, when making Boyhood, shot it in fits and starts over 14 years to watch the characters realistically age but if the movie doesn't work for you, knowing that shouldn't change your opinion. That Who Let The Dogs Out was written as an anti-catcalling feminist anthem doesn't change the fact that it's a pretty terrible song. 

Barthes would forgive me my love of the music of Wagner, a composer who was as personally vile as he was musically gifted, so anti-Semitic that his work is banned in Israel to this day. Do the composer's odious feelings permeate the music? Not to my ears. "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text," writes Barthes. Wagner’s music is more expansive than his limited world view. It does not absolve him of his many personal failings but it is better than he was, presenting a world of love and art that he couldn’t bear to inhabit himself. Besides, the music belongs to me now and I reassert my ownership every time I listen to it. When I sing “You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope one day you join me and the world will be his one,” am I honoring an idea or a man who beat his wife? Surely, the idea. To litigate a contemporary argument, we should point out that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...” are the words of a hypocrite who failed his own notion, but isn’t the notion worthwhile regardless?

Is this a way of justifying continuing liking the things I like without dealing with the moral problems of their creators? Perhaps. I try to be sensitive to that but I also can't imagine a more artistically starved existence than only consuming work by people of flawless moral respectability. Goodbye, Alice in Wonderland, whose author had relations with children that we would deem inappropriate. Goodbye, Wizard of Oz, whose author hated Native Americans. Dostoevsky hated Poles. Kant hated Africans. Walt Disney hated Jews. The TV show The Good Place, probably the only sitcom in history in which Kierkegaard is routinely referenced, argues that morality is such an impossible maze where even good actions support bad people. That point is underlined by the fact that it is made by a character played by Ted Danson, who once did a roast routine in front of 3000 people in blackface while using the n-word multiple times. Rocky plays with a toy work bench where when you push a button, Elmo sings "Elmo's working on the work bench" to the tune of I've Been Working On The Railroad, a song of ambiguously racial origins. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Cancel Elmo? Death of the author creates a world where that song can be simply annoying, not problematic.

Admittedly, the notion becomes thorny when the author is alive and can personally benefit from their work. As strongly as I adhere to Barthes’ argument, there are Bill Cosby routines that are less funny to me now for reasons that have nothing to do with the jokes. R. Kelly, whose voice is as smooth as ever, is hard to listen to. Other bad actors are harder to disavow. It turns out the rapper who I think is the most talented pop star of this century is either a raving lunatic or a performative raving lunatic and I don’t know which is worse. And what to do now that an incredibly successful and influential children's book author has, according to some, decided to double down on transphobia? The instinct is to discontinue our support and disavow these artists, which is pragmatic and probably right to do but avoids a different question—do their sins invalidate the joy their art once gave us? Can their art give us joy still?

This is all the more troubling because, to answer my initial question, there really can be evil art. The Birth of a Nation, the silent film epic that tells a fabricated, whitewashed story of the Civil War and Reconstruction, complete with a scene in which a white woman hurls herself off a cliff to avoid being violated by a brutish black man (a white actor in blackface) is racist, misleading, revisionist and caused a resurgence in the Ku Klux Klan, which the film portrays as saintly heroes of the old South. The Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf, which I should announce that I have not read, are a starter pack for an alt-right neo-Nazi. Every hate group has songs and anthems. These are disgusting works designed to spread hate. Does that describe the Harry Potter series, regardless of what opinions its writer holds?

Good work does not forgive bad behavior and it is unfortunate that many of the things we love as perfect are created by imperfect people. It would be easier if creativity and innovation were moral virtues possessed only by those who were wholly good and it is frustrating that enjoying the things we love sometimes means putting money in the hands of those with contemptible thoughts. But demanding that of the world is not purity, it's naïveté, and a recipe for misery. In regards to J.K. Rowling's case, Helen Lewis of the Atlantic argues that a desire for simplicity—good art by good people—is an admirable but childish notion. I mentioned the portraits in my son's room earlier. In my daughter's room is a painting of Flannery O'Connor, a more complicated image to be sure. O'Connor held racist beliefs which she expressed in personal letters and let affect her behavior, especially towards black writers, whom she shunned. Her writing, however, is beautiful and strange, old-fashioned and universal, certainly attributes a father can hope a daughter possesses. When the time is right, I look forward to sharing O'Connor's writing with Effie because of how it poignantly balances that all of us are flawed with darkness within us with the  never-ending immediate need for grace. The author is dead. Long live their work.