Art maketh the man

[davywavy]

I was listening to the Today programme the other day, bringing myself up to date with the important morning news in the hope that something interesting might have happened like Martians landing and disintegrating Gordon Brown with a beam of white-hot radiation but, alas, all I got was Thought for the day. Rashly I didn't leap across the room shouting Noooooooooo in slow motion and hit the off button, but instead listened to a rather rubbish and waffly fellow trying to make some sort of point.

He was telling a clearly made up story about how only the day before he'd encountered a small child singing Two Little Boys and had to tell him to stop as he "wasn't supposed to sing that song any more". Leaving aside the annoying smugness of someone telling a small child to stop singing, I say the story was clearly made up because
1) The number of children under the age of 10 who know the lyrics to a song forty years old is a vanishingly small proportion of the population - it'd be like me knowing the words to Minnie the Moocher when I was eight - and
2) The statistical probability of encountering one of them within 24 hours of Rolf Harris being banged up is pretty remote, I'd say.

So we're left with the edifying spectacle of a man of the cloth making up a story about him bullying a small child because he couldn't think of any other way to introduce his point - which was whether the works of an artist can be, or should be, divorced from their actions.
Certainly there have been several news articles about galleries removing Rolf Harris' work from display; he was, for several years in the early 1990s, Britains most bankable artist and one suspects that a lot of people are now gazing disconsolately at was once a valuable potential family heirloom on the living room wall and wondering whether just to stick it in the loft and have done. I'm guessing the portrait of the Queen Harris did is no longer in the gallery at Buck House.

But it does raise the question: to what extent can or should the works of an artist be divorced from their actions? The most obvious case is Eric Gill, whose sculptures decorate the front of the BBC's Broadcasting House, but whose personal life doesn't bear examination in what is a family blog. Suffice to say you wouldn't have wanted to be a member of his family. Or one of his pets.
Then there was Rousseau, who put his own children into an orphanage to free up time to write down his brilliant and necessary ideas; John Lennon, who knocked both his wives around; Caravaggio, who murdered someone; and Woody Allen, whose private life was so scandalous he had to move to France. There's a very long list of artists who have created what at least some consider to be great works but who were downright loathsome in their private lives.

So, seeing as how it's Friday and nobody does any work on Fridays, that's the question for today: To what extend can, or should, the life of the artist be considered distinct from their works? Or should we just quietly dispose of their art when the truth comes out?

Comments

[kathminchin.livejournal.com]

An article in the Guardian claims that neither the Queen nor the BBC know where the portrait Rolf Harris painted is.

I can't help but feel that it depends a lot on the passage of time. Rolf's victims, their families and friends are all still alive and the pain is very raw. Having his work hanging up in a gallery could be said to be highly insensitive. Caravaggio on the other hand is dead and his pictures can be viewed in a more dispassionate historical context.

Lennon and Allen I don't know if enough time has passed, or if the fact that Lennon is dead (and Yoko seems to have no issues with his memory - I don't know about other women in his life) makes a difference. I know I don't watch Woody Allen films but that's a choice made because I find them interminably dull, and is a decision I came to before I learned about the issues in his personal life. Lennon I didn't know had done anything until I read it on your blog.

[(Anonymous)]

When you buy a product, you endorse the process by which it was created. Or, as much as you know of it anyway. This is why sausage or consumer electronics manufacturers don't stick pictures of their factories on their packaging.

Hence, were any kids abused during the process of the creation of Rolf's art, as a part of that process?

Also, you reward the artist. Since he's dead, that point is moot.

For myself, as long as the picture doesn't feature abuse, and no-one was abused as part of it's creation process, then I'd judge it on it's merits alone.

[richard marsh (from livejournal.com)]

Don't think that's true. When you buy you just consume you don't endorse. Most countries buy auto fuel or battery farm eggs despite the way it's produced not because of it. Sausages are cheap meat and daresay that many people estibg value sausages would love a fillet steak.

[richard marsh (from livejournal.com)]

You missed Wagner. Question is how good is the art, how severe was the crime and can the crime be divorced from the art. I can enjoy lennon songs without being uncomfortable about domestic abuse but many people find it difficult to enjoy Wagner, brilliant as it is, without the art itself reminding the audience of the baggage that comes with it.

Would suggest Rolph was always more celebrity than artist and his work is too closely intertwined with children to pass the separation test.

That said thought for the day is always good for a giggle. They either blatantly make it up or use a real story and say isn't that a bit like Jesus?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I'm in the rather happy camp of thinking that Wagner is bloody awful, and so don't have to worry about whether liking him makes me a bad person.