Art and ethics

Last week I listed my top ten books. Included on that list were some authors with unsavory ideas and personal lives, so today I return to that old question that has plagued me for some time: what responsibility do I, as an ethical person, have regarding the art I enjoy and endorse?

As examples, let me explore some artists I like. Sylvia Plath may have been antisemitic in the very genteel, WASPy manner of her time. If she was, it's difficult to tell from her writing, where she in fact often identifies with Jews, particularly those that suffered during the Holocaust. This is something that is therefore easy to ignore.

Olive Moore, on the other hand, expressed in her writing some morally disgusting views toward black people, the elderly, and the disabled. These ideas are absent, as far as I can remember, from the book that made my top ten, but it is clear that she was a very hateful woman. I am able to excuse my admiration of her writing ability because I fall into some of the categories of people that are the objects of her scorn, and I guess I figure that gives me the right to like her writing even though I despise many of her ideas.

With J. M. Barrie, we get into murkier territory. Barrie was possibly a pedophile who took custody of the Llewelyn Davies boys for sinister purposes. The fact that this is unverified is the only reason I can justify my love for Peter Pan.

Henry Darger occupies the same space as Barrie: an unconfirmed, but likely, pedophile, who glamorized children in the same childlike way Barrie did. Neither have evidence linking them to acting on any impulses they may have had. Darger drew nude little girls, but he never had live models, and besides that, his naked girls had male genitalie--a clear indication that he never saw female genitalia. If some evidence surfaced regarding either of them, would I then have to condemn their art along with their actions? Would I naturally develop a distaste for it?

To answer this question, let me explore two, more complex, artists. The first, Lewis Carroll, is one whose work I have never particularly loved. I recognize the value in the Alice books, but I didn't read them until I was an adult and already aware of of Carroll's unsettling photographic works, and that may have colored my perception of the books. Carroll may never have touched any of the girls he photographed, but his perversion is clear, and his no doubt barely concealed leering must have had some sort of troubling effect on his subjects.

Second, there's Hans Bellmer, whose work I very much admired until I discovered his pedophilic desires. Unlike Carroll, Bellmer apparently never interacted with any children in an inappropriate way and was pretty meek in his relationships with adult women. He even credited his art with keeping him from acting on his desires, so why should I reject his art? Shouldn't I have a moral reason, then, to support it? I suppose I reacted so strongly against his art because I was so disappointed. What was I expecting, one might ask, from someone who created those dolls. Well, I suppose the enacted brutalization of adult women (as I believed the dolls to be) is marginally less bad than the brutalization of children. Perhaps what affected me most was seeing a photograph he had in his collection. Knowing I was seeing real children being forced to do terrible things put me off Bellmer and his art permanently.

Of course, that doesn't answer the question of whether I should reject the art of a horrible human being, or that I need to if I am to be a good person. But I'm not sure there is one.