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Does the artist matter in the artwork?

Luger

Rabbi of Platinum Nation
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It kind of does to me.
Roman Polanski is a a :eek::eek::eek::eek: and I enjoy Rosemary's baby.
It does bug me, what kind of person made something that I enjoy.

Lets say that a racist person towards blacks makes something great, do the black people not get tainted by the views of the artists?

I'll throw in Oscar Wilde's intro of a book:

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.
 
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Good post. I think it's hard if not impossible to separate them. Imagine going round someone's house and they were playing lost prophet records, you would be surprised and think they were a bit weird and pretty crass considering the singer is a convicted :eek::eek::eek::eek: who did terrible shit.

Even artists who aren't criminals but just racists or scumbags, I wouldn't be comfortable giving these people my money, no matter how much I may like their art. I would feel like I am indirectly supporting their views.
 
When it comes to art, artist`s persona is important part of subjective interpretation.
 
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Yeah, kind of does....



















































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Yes.
For example, racist-ass Melly Gibsons.
I'll never pay a dime that goes into his pocket. Why would I?
"I hope you get raped by a pack of chiggers" (actual quotation altered to comply with whatever sensitivity blah blah dark skin yadda yadda)

Horrible person, he's shown it over and over.
 
Imagine going round someone's house and they were playing lost prophet records, you would be surprised and think they were a bit weird and pretty crass considering the singer is a convicted :eek::eek::eek::eek: who did terrible shit.

One sick psycho.
The things he did and tried to do.

Reminds me of a book I had.
Killer Writing, I think it was called.
It was written by Gerard Scaefer, a serial killer, but very well written.
I wonder if he had focused on writing instead of killing, he probably could have been successful
 
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Not really. The art's not gonna do anything bad, unless the art is a crime which is kinda my forte.

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Fuck that shit. And fuck these replies claiming it matters. It's the same people that'll turn around and say, "its a fight, not citizen of the year awards!" when talking about not liking Jones because he's a shitty person but can fight. The art is art. Good or bad, no matter who made it. I will pay a racist man for his awesome work and I will not pay a good man for a shitty job.
 
It can be a tough pill to swallow at first, but ultimately art is art at the end of the day. I'll never hang one of Hitler's paintings on my wall, but compared to myself and many others the man had some talent when it came to drawing and painting.

Lostprophets is another good extreme example. I think it's a shame that the other band members contributions are now forgotten. They had no idea what was going on with the singer, so them making music together was just business as usual.

And then there's Mel Gibson - we've all heard the phone calls. But that man knows how to direct a movie, and I wish more directors had his ambition for making movies like Apocalypto.
 
you guys should read the essay of french critic Roland Barthes who, in 1967 i think published The Death of the Author, which deals exactly with the problem of the need to judge a literary (and enhancing it to all art) work based solely on its merits and not on any biographical data of the author.

it's difficult, especially when one deals with giants like Michelangelo for example, where the work is so overwhelmingly important to human culture and the development of the human spirit in art that we might ignore the fact that he might, in our current view of things, have been a :eek::eek::eek::eek:phile.

the dismissive attitude towards the artist if his biography is not "good" is just laziness, as long as said work is not integral to what makes that person "bad".
 
Fuck that shit. And fuck these replies claiming it matters. It's the same people that'll turn around and say, "its a fight, not citizen of the year awards!" when talking about not liking Jones because he's a shitty person but can fight. The art is art. Good or bad, no matter who made it. I will pay a racist man for his awesome work and I will not pay a good man for a shitty job.
This is a thread for opinions. Like most others.
And my ability to appreciate a work of art with my senses discontinues at my wallet if the artist in question is a demonstrable piece of shit.
 
Yeah don't care who painted/wrote it.
 
It's hard to approve of Roman Polanski as a person, but he is in the conversation for greatest film director ever.

Mel Gibson is an anti-Semitic POS... But is also a great director and very good actor. As much as I dislike the man's politics, I can't bring myself to hate Lethal Weapon or Mad Max or Braveheart.

But it does detract from the art a bit.

Fortunately I don't like Chris Brown music anyway, so his applying the hammerfist of doom to women just helps me dislike his songs even more.
 
Also something to consider for those who can't separate the man from the art, look at Jared from Subway and all the lives he touched. Pun very much intended.

He inspired a lot of people to lose weight, and yeah he turned out to be a piece of shit :eek::eek::eek::eek:, but even with knowing that now it doesn't invalidate the people's weight loss who were inspired by him.
 
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