One Thesis on a Morality of Art

A principle that occurs to me when it comes to “separating art from the artist,” a concept and verbal formula that I think is stupid, misleading, and mendacious to begin with, is that on top of everything else it frankly depends upon the quality of the art. If we are going to use flippant aesthetic terminology in order to have half-baked discussions of morals, it ought to be used in reference to aesthetic and moral ideas that are themselves at least vaguely proportional in terms of scale.

Let’s take music as an example. Claudio Monteverdi was a favorite of the hilariously corrupt Pope Paul V, but this relationship gave the world some of the best religious music ever composed. Richard Wagner was so obviously antisemitic that not even the Bayreuth Festival people bother any longer to deny it, but he gave us the drone note at the beginning of Das Rheingold. Artie Shaw physically abused Ava Gardner for reading Forever Amber, then divorced her and married the author of Forever Amber, but his clarinet work has yet to be surpassed and he gave us one of the most influential recordings of the sublime “Begin the Beguine.” Roger Waters is a godawful tankie, but “Wish You Were Here” is almost as sublime as “Begin the Beguine.” Billy Corgan did…something to Emilie Autumn while they were dating in the early 2000s that is not my place to speculate about, but he gave us “Bullet with Butterfly Wings.” Compare all that to someone like, say, the insufferable edgelord nepo baby Matty Healy, who has been in the entertainment news a lot of late. Part of why we ought to be less tolerant of Matty Healy than of Roger Waters is that Healy, simply, does not produce anything whose aesthetic qualities come as close to offsetting his moral problems as “Wish You Were Here” comes to offsetting Waters’s. Healy has the personal habits and worldview of an edgy bro with a crappy boy band, and the music that that crappy boy band produces reflects this, whereas much of Pink Floyd’s output sounds “as if” it could have been written and performed by someone who does not engage in Putin apologia or “blood and soil but woke” anti-Zionism.

Speaking more generally, aesthetic qualities as a rule cannot offset lack of moral qualities because morality is more important than aesthetics. Almost everything that people value artistically, or politically or interpersonally for that matter, can, should, and must be sacrificed if that is what needs to be done to avoid serious moral lapses. On that note it is also much easier to read or look at or listen to older art without enabling these people by giving them one’s money. Monteverdi, Wagner, and Shaw are all long-dead; Pink Floyd and the Smashing Pumpkins both have discographies that are very easy to find on CD or vinyl in secondhand stores (younger people might have to buy CD players or turntables on which to play these hard copies, but that is not too difficult a task for anyone who is not an insufferably presentist, Whiggery-addled ghoul). I’m sure Matty Healy’s oeuvre is remarkably easy to pirate, and I wish his fans joy of it. But after a certain point aesthetic judgments do need to be made in order for moral questions to be approached in a way that feels truthful and compelling.