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If support of the art is in turn supporting the artist in hurting other people, there is no separation, just a lie we tell ourselves to avoid cognitive dissonance.

If the artist is dead, or otherwise unable to hurt people, then and only then is it possible to separate the two

Usually I'm not in the mood anymore after I get to know some artist is an asshole. It's not like I use my brain and deliberately try to reason about it. Or that I feel hatred towards the book/song now... But I never felt like re-reading Harry Potter after that. Or let Tidal play some artists' songs. The fun is just spoiled, I guess.

Case in point I use Piefed because the dev believes in democracy and human rights.

I think the link between the work and the artist is thin but unbreakable.

If you want to understand a literary work, you need to understand its context*. That context includes the author, but also when it was created, the original medium, the culture it's from… and the readers. Yup, people shape the work as they read it, and sometimes in ways that cancel out what the author said. But the voice of the author is still there. You can't simply ignore it; at most fight against it, and sometimes win.

Now, let's say the author is bad, but the work is good. Then it stops being just a literary matter, to become a moral one. It's all about weighting the harm caused by the author (and, as you said, subsidising that author and their problematic views) versus the benefit that the work itself would give to potential new readers. There isn't a single right answer that'll apply to all works, I think.

For example. Lovecraft was a racist piece of shit. But he kicked the bucket already, and his books are in public domain in most countries. So no matter how much you talk about his books, and how many readers pick them up, you aren't really financing a racist. So I guess it's fine? One might argue the racism leaks into the work, but remember what I said about readers being able to fight against the voice of the author?

Then there are cases like Harry Potter. We know JK Rowling is a bloody TERF. And if you buy her books, it's money being given to someone who will use it to promote her shitty views. One might say "just pirate them!", but plenty people won't pirate, and they'll know about the work because you talked about it. Then IMO it's getting into yucky territory, the odds you're causing harm by promoting that work are getting bigger, for a relatively small benefit people would get from the work itself.

Just my two cents.

*by "context", here, I mean everything around the text that shapes its meaning.

The art is not just the thing - it's impossible to experience it in isolation of it's context which you've constructed from your experiences and feelings and knowledge as well as how the art is situated and framed to you. This might be the point of the Fountain.

So I think it's impossible to separate the work for the artist if you have knowledge pertaining to them. Michael Jackson was an incredible talent, and his music is significant in my memories of my own childhood, but it hits different for me now. If we played his music to an alien freshly arrived from Mars they might think it's perfect, but it never can be again for us.

It's entirely possible to consume art without benefiting the artist. It's called piracy.

When my grandkids want to watch Harry Potter, JK Rowling doesn't get a penny from the act of me streaming it on an illegal site.

If the artist is still alive, then generally no. I don’t support any anti-trans artists because their beliefs and sometimes actions harm me and people I care about. It would be hypocritical and privileged of me to not apply that to artists that harm groups I’m not in.

If the artist is dead however, I’m a bit more flexible. A vast amount of historical artists were sexist or racist or bigoted in some way by modern standards. Not to mention the art the created may be constrained by the norms of the time as well. It would be extremely difficult to find a historical artist without something to take issue with and they’re not actively harming anyone anymore.

Yes, I'm very "death of the artist". But to me, that mostly means that the artist doesn't get any more say in what a finished piece of art means than anybody else.

If I like a piece of art, but not the artist that made it, that's not a contradiction to me. Bad people can still make great art. Take Ace of Base: I'm never going to give them money, but I still listen to "Cruel Summer". This is a song that is definitely not promoting White Supremacy.

yes. and i don't respect people who can't and who want to lecture me on how enjoying anything is bad if it wasn't made by a perfect person.

to me people who think that way are telling on themselves and their lack of skill in critical thinking and their embrace of hypocrisy.

It's hard as fuck these days.

Minecraft and Notch?

Young Kanye vs Nazi Ye?

American Gods and Neil Gaiman?

Harry Potter and TERF Queen?

The hard part is defining the lines.

Is Louie CK as bad as Cosby?

People apologizing for PewDiePie's Nazi shit when he was a kid?

I fucking just heard that Andy Weir has some problematic views.

Mixed feelings. I don't like supporting horrible people but at the same time I simply cannot background check every artist/actor.

Yes and no

Yes insofar as the work really does stand alone - if it was suddenly revealed that Vincent van Gogh was a mass murderer, or a space alien, or a Labrador Retriever, or literally any other thing one might imagine, Starry Night would still look exactly the same.

And no insofar as I don't want my money going to a piece of shit, and to the degree that I can prevent that from happening, I do.

It depends. What’s the context? What’s the purpose or goal?

If the goal is to evaluate technical merit or the chemical composition or the audio waves or the pixels, then the artist may be trivial.

If the goal is to establish chains of causality, bolster or undermine moral stances, or simply understand the context of a piece of work, then the artist is central.

Context and purpose are crucial.

I view art as an open communication of sorts. It can be viewed without knowledge of the person behind it, but in general the more you expose yourself to a person, the better you get to know them. Their styles, values, thought patterns, all of which get baked into the art in a fundamental level.

For that reason, I don't really think you can. You can look at their works from how you engage with them, absolutely, but you can't fully disengage yourself with the idea that someone alive made this. It dehumanises creators, turning them into content machines. You may as well get an AI to start churning out garbage.

Lindsay Ellis has a nice video about this

I don't have time to vet everyone whose work I enjoy. Another issue I have is that if I've enjoyed someone's work for years, and it's become dear to me, am I supposed to just turn that enjoyment off if it turns out they're problematic?

Yes, because I can't possibly keep investigating the moral compass of every artist out there.

I do.

Some of the works I admire the most have been written (or painted, or composed,...) by people I don't like, to say the least.

Humans are complex beings.
Culture, social norms (good vs bad) and historical background (what was considered legal and illegal) are also very complex. And the can be very different from one region to the next, and even in the same region from one time period to the next.

While, on the other hand, the action of judging someone else (or some past time) is often lazy as fuck, based on nothing but personal emotions (hate, anger, sadness,... or their exact opposite), distaste (I don't like to see/hear/taste this or that) and preconceptions (I think people should (not) be allowed to do this or that).

You don't believe me? Well, you're absolutely right to not believe anyone, me included, but then just go ask a few racists out there how easy it is to judge (and to hate on) someone based on their race or skin color, or even on their culture and social norms being different from ours... Do we really want to act like racists? I certainly don't, even when it's for other reasons than race, even for 'moral' reasons. Which, btw, is in itself a very changing notion.

I also think no one, me included, is perfect. So, how come should I be allowed to judge and to condemn anyone based on their own imperfections and faults?

Judging should be the job of the judges: people that been educated to fairly be judging (aka by accepting as a fact that anyone accused of anything should be considered innocent until proven otherwise) people's actions based on a set of arbitrary rules (that is the law) and when deemed necessary by punishing anyone that has not respected said rules. Judging should not be my job as an individual, filled with my own emotions and personal biases, nor as a citizen with my own set of values, and it is even less so as an amateur of art (no matter how deeply I may (dis)like some artists).

Its a ridiculous concept, "you have to separate the art from the artist," no we don't, in fact it is actively harmful when we do. You know who never says to separate the art from the artist? The artist. And if that artist harmed people, their victims and families aren't gonna be separating the art from the artist either.

Taking of for granted that people should separate the producer from the product -- gee, where have I heard this before? "Oh, you see, you have to look at things in this narrow way that makes no sense" nobody has to do that. All power and value in society is just people doing stuff, the value of the art is created by the time and energy of the artist, the galleries, the socialites, the critics, etc., thinking of art as just some commodity is atrocious, not to mention, the artists time and expertise is in the art.

No piece of art is known by the people who owned it, inly the artist. Like sometimes theres a "collector" that donates or showcases their collection and you hear about those people. But most of the time, most people, don't give a shit who owned the thing.

Finally, think about it the other way. Would anyone ever "separate the art from the artist" when going to sell it? Picasso produced an immense amount of work, few people could tell the difference between a Picasso and like just a bunch of shapes on a page, arranged a certain way, if they had never seen either one before. Some people might prefer the shapes over the Picasso. So if someone found a Picasso in their grandmas attic, and grandma needed a new Cadillac, would they ever try to not sell the work as a Picasso? Like believing the art itself would stand on its own and grandma would get just as much money marketing the artist as unknown rather than marketing it as a genuine Picasso.

The only time people tell you to separate the producer from the product is when they're fucking you over. I think people just hear it and don't wanna sound like a shitty person for liking Ted Nugent, and so they repeat it. It sounds smart I guess, it often makes people at least pause on it, but in reality bit makes no sense whatsoever, and we don't have to mystify it or acknowledge the view as legitimate.

I do because contiuing to enjoy something that wasn't problematic by itself doesn't suddenly continue supporting the artist by re-reading/re-watching/re-listening to the copy you already own, nor does destroying it take what you already paid back.

yup. I ususally do not hunt down the hisories on anything in particular I watch. often times I don't even know who all was involved in the creation. if they are especially heinous I might avoid any of my money supporting the work but that is about it.

Not while they're alive. If they're long gone, we can talk about it.

Depends.

Is the artist dead? Then sure.

Will they benefit in any way from my support of their work?

Then no.

Did I pay for it before I found out that they were X, Y, or Z?

Then enjoy it, or don't, just don't give them more money.

Yeah, I've got most of Gaiman's books. I still think his collab with Pratchet was brilliant. But he'll never get another cent from me. Roman Polanski? I pirate his shit, he and his estate will never see my money.

Not while they're alive certainly, and maybe not ever.

I don't think supporting the work really needs to be supporting the artist. I think some folks conflate the 2 and really don't separate it. My personal take is, you can like something like a song or a painting, but that shouldn't mean you then buy the CD or merch. I think once you do that, only at that point are you really supporting both.

no. ian watkins music should burn with him

You need to learn this ability to separate the art from the artist.

Otherwise, what's the point. However, if the work is political, religious, or economic, and you can't separate that, this is completely understandable on some levels. It's more the general side of things that should give you easy separation between art and the artist.

Unrelated but relevant, most of these people who are deleted from existence by AI chatbos are ones who can't separate reality from fiction. I can do this just fine, as I learned how to distinguish between the two.