Then I ran across this article in the Globe and Mail: Why we shouldn’t boycott Michael Jackson’s music by Mark Kingwell, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He says:
The vivid revelations of sexual abuse by pop star Michael Jackson – unproven in court, but hauntingly recounted by survivors in a recent documentary and an Oprah Winfrey special – have raised once again that thorny question: Can you still enjoy the art or wisdom of someone who is alleged to have done evil?He goes on to cite the numerous cases of great writers and artists who were, in their private lives, really terrible people: drunks, murderers, anti-Semites, and outright Nazis like Martin Heidegger. He comments as follows:
His 1933 Rector’s Speech at the University of Freiburg is an uncommonly clear defence of the authoritarian status of Adolf Hitler, and of the subservient role universities must assume under a Nazi regime. It is an indefensible, shameful performance: craven, arrogant, pretentious, and slick all at once. Heidegger worked to destroy his Jewish former mentor, Edmund Husserl, and maltreated his secret Jewish lover, Hannah Arendt.
What a world-class creep! And still I recommend that my students read Heidegger. Why? Because the man is the instrument, not the hand. I assign his work in almost every class I teach, because his insight is indisputable. I never play down the Nazi proclivities, or how they are joined to deeper thoughts about Earth and world, beauty and truth. He was a terrible man, but a great philosopher.The reason, "Because the man is the instrument, not the hand," seems incoherent. That's the reason to read Heidegger? Kingwell concludes:
That is how it rolls here on planet Earth. Human beings are flawed, sometimes terrible creatures. And yet they can, under the right circumstances, commune with the sublime. I don’t know how that is possible, but it is. Don’t turn off the music, friends: Just turn on the awareness.He does not know how it is possible to be both an awful human being but still "commune with the sublime."
The irony here is that Socrates himself was condemned to death by a jury of 500 good and true Athenian citizens on trumped up charges. He was really condemned because he was an influential teacher of two figures who later turned out to be nasty politicians. Because of an amnesty, the real charges could not be stated so he was convicted of corrupting the young, no examples given!
Taking a page from Socrates' method, a number of questions come to mind. It seems as if we are postulating two separate realms: one is private or practical, and the other is aesthetic or abstract. On the one hand, Michael Jackson and Martin Heidegger provide to us high quality aesthetic or philosophical material of great worth. On the other hand, in the more mundane sphere they acted in an allegedly evil manner. Kingwell argues, well, not argues exactly as I don't discern an actual argument, claims rather, that we should not connect these two spheres even though it is the same person acting in both realms. When Heidegger is offering "deeper thoughts about Earth and world, beauty and truth" we are to accept and admire his wisdom, but when he is arguing for the Nazi party and acting as an anti-Semite we are supposed to pretend that this is the action of a different person? That's a bit awkward, isn't it? We perform this kind of dance every day, of course. In our daily life we encounter people who are reported to have done bad things, but we ignore this unless it affects our business relationship. But in the areas of art and philosophy, are we as pragmatic? Don't we tend to think that an artist is a whole person, that their art is a reflection of their private lives? This is just a question I am posing, a genuine, not a rhetorical question. Because I might argue that an aesthetic object is NOT simply an expression of the personality or biography of the artist.
The arts and philosophy are, surprise surprise, complex. Perhaps a horrible person can write great poetry or music. It reminds me of a song by Michael Jackson:
So he was bad, but was he "bad?"
UPDATE: I've been reading some of the comments on the web and there seem to be three different views that are frequently expressed:
- Michael Jackson, and artists generally, may be horrible people, but this has nothing to do with their art which we can enjoy without guilt.
- Michael Jackson's music is pretty much crap anyway, and I quit listening to it years ago. Now I just have another reason not to.
- Once you know that an artist or musician is a horrible person it cannot help but influence how you respond to the art.
The odd thing is that I find myself agreeing with all three views! For a lot of art, that by Caravaggio or Gesualdo for example, we seem to be able to ignore the private life of the artist. In other cases, the art itself seems irretrievably stained by the character of the artist. The case of Kevin Spacey comes to mind. Frankly I disliked his work (the characters he played?) from American Beauty on. Then there are cases where you were not hugely taken with the art and when the bad character of the artist was revealed that made you less willing to give the benefit of the doubt. I think that there might be a fourth possibility not stated too clearly yet.
What if the character of the artist and the nature and quality of the work may in fact have a necessary connection? It might be what you would expect, i.e. the artwork is flawed because the artist is flawed; or the relation might be contrary. There are interesting cases of actors who always played nasty villains who in real life were very fine and good people. In some art the nature of the medium might be one in which the personal character might not play much of a role. Bach's religious views probably affected his fugues for keyboard a whole lot less than they did his sacred cantatas. On the other hand, some media seem oriented towards revealing or expressing precisely the inner thoughts of the artist. In that case, a bad character has to have some influence on the art, wouldn't you think?
I guess what I see all of the current accounts getting wrong is that they are all trying to put forth a simple answer and I suspect there isn't one.
there often seems to be a gap between the public/private aspects of an artist's life. Dickens may have been a great advocate for social and economic and legal reform but he could still be an awful husband to his wife. it can seem as though a flip side to artists with publicly progressive sympathies is that they can sincerely believe that this gives them the moral license to be nasty people at an interpersonal level.
ReplyDeleteJackson may fit into a category of artist in which part of the appeal of the art could be predicated on leveraging an element of their public persona in a way to advocate for causes that, with the additional insight of personal misdeeds bring brought to light in the public sphere, retroactively cast doubt on the veracity or sincerity of the soapboxing. We can't exactly separate Bill Cosby's America's dad persona and his public remarks on conduct from how he has been discovered to have treated women behind the scenes. A John Lennon who beat his wife might not directly contradict a John Lennon singing "give peace a chance" in the sense that the personal is not the political just because that mantra is popular, there are ways in which the geopolitical is not the personal-political. The bluntest way to put it is to say that if artists are going to insist on preaching they had best actually practice what they preach. This may be, in part, why a J. S. Bach has some staying power beyond the imposing craft of his music. Although he was a punchline in a lot of comedy in the last twenty years Mr. Rogers has retroactively been regarded as a praiseworthy media figure because he practiced his preaching. The show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood may still seem anodyne but I hope my point is clear, we can cut a lot more slack to artists, however we assess their art, if we can see they are not living by double standards in which they don't feel obliged to live by the axioms they tell us in their art we ought to be living by.
At a somewhat different level, someone like Johnny Cash whose public persona featured a man wrestling with his inner demons and lesser aspects doesn't come across like a hypocrite for doing so. You can fail to live up to your ideals in a way that does not signal that you think you're exempt from living by them. But Cash was also clear that the performing persona was not necessarily who the man himself was. In that sense a Cash or a Bowie that is up front about the public persona as just that may have less to answer for than pop stars who present their public persona as who they actually are.
For me there was nothing Michael Jackson's music did that I didn't think was done even more brilliantly by Stevie Wonder earlier and, thing is, it seemed MIchael Jackson may have felt the same way. The best songs Michael Jackson performed are still shadows, for me, of the things Stevie Wonder did in "Living for the City".
That's an excellent analysis! You brought out just those things I missed or passed over. Yes, it is the hypocrisy that we find particularly distasteful. So if you are an artist who takes up some social or political cause, you would best not contradict that position in your personal life. Hmm, that would seem to disqualify all those celebrities who take carbon-spewing private jets to climate change conferences...
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