Yes, You Can Separate Art From The Artist
And you can engage with "problematic" art without feeling guilty
In 2021, I wrote a sort of manifesto for dealing with art created by people with difficult/unseemly backgrounds or personal lives, or art deemed “problematic” in the minds of joyless political activists.
To be sure, the phenomenon of cancellation has subsided since then. Thankfully, it’s become much harder to galvanize groups of people to get someone fired from their job (for example) for reading the wrong book, listening to the wrong album, or watching the wrong movie. The reasons for this cooling of tensions is worth exploring in its own article.
But for now, the few losers who still seek to cancel people today are safely cordoned off in BlueSky — where you can party like it’s 2020 forever. I’m sure spaces like the “young adult fiction community” (i.e., lonely Millennials careening into their 40s) on Goodreads and countless sub-Reddits are still absolute hellscapes. But to the extent that any issue bears the power of cancellation today, it’s confined to the Israel-Palestine conflict and infighting within political coalitions.
In other words, we’ve arrived at something like a 2011 detente, in which the “Vampire Castle” (to use Mark Fisher’s formulation) operates within overwhelmingly “left-wing” spaces, and its corollary on the right mostly relates to how dedicated fellow conservatives are to supporting Trump (much like it was with the Tea Party in 2011, the War on Terror after 9/11, Reaganism in the 1980s, and so on).
Today, I’d like to expand on and add to six key points I made in my original piece while integrating another construct into these ideas, that of the Devouring Mother. Although Carl Jung didn’t use that exact term, it’s a useful shorthand for the “shadow” version of his Great Mother archetype. Essentially, the Devouring Mother overprotects and actively works against her children’s maturity, lest they gain any independence or self-reliance. The Devouring Mother’s nature is possessive, manipulative, and smothering. Rather than build up and nurture her children, she raises stunted, immature, and fearful kids who never really become adults.
When people deride the idea of “separating art from the artist” or “enjoying art for its own sake” they often approach it as a way of “preventing harm” to members of one or another oppressed or historically marginalized group, or perhaps one of their friends they imagine to be especially sensitive. You probably know where I’m going with this. This amounts to treating people from entire groups like children. At the individual level, someone who takes your fragility, feebleness, and weakness as a given — before you’ve even had the chance to make your own judgement — is not your friend.1
Keep those those ideas in your mind as you read on.
One: What Art Represents
Why is art valuable? Or to reverse the question in the spirit of Oscar Wilde, what makes it “quite useless?”
Through the act of reading, listening, and watching, we enter a space of pure imagination and reflection, unimpeded by our obligations to work, family, society, and that realm of law, power, and ideology—the political. Art can contain reflections on that realm, and much of the best art does. But as art, its function in that space is ambiguous and uncertain, which allows it to maintain relevance beyond its original creation, linking past and present together in a universal experience.
As Albert Camus said in The Rebel, art “teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.” This is unsettling to the propagandist and the fanatic. It posits that ideology can’t extinguish the eternal questions, as “Long after his death, Rembrandt’s philosopher still meditates, between light and shade, on the same problem.” He issues a stark warning that: “Each time that the revolution kills in a man the artist that he might have been, it attenuates itself a little more. If, finally, the conquerors succeed in molding the world according to their laws, it will not prove that quantity is king, but that this world is hell.”
Or to return to Wilde: “Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way.” This sets it outside the bounds of any political project, unless you force the moral character of the artist into the discussion. It echoes Fidel Castro’s speech to intellectuals in 1961: “inside the revolution — everything; outside the revolution — nothing.”
Two: The Totalitarian Impulse of Politicization
And that’s precisely why it creates such a problem for fanatical political activists. It doesn’t fit conveniently into any cause, as it’s not made for that purpose. To the extent that art is made for explicitly activist reasons, this takes away from any enduring power it could have, as it renders it little more than a pamphlet handed out by miserable college students at Union Square.
I’ve heard a lot of terrible things said over the last few years—this anxious age we can’t seem to escape. But one of the worst was this ghastly piece of English: “Listening to music is itself a political act.” That’s right: Sound waves interacting with a person’s nerve cells must at all times render a value judgment relevant to the wielding of political power. This isn’t just radical-chic lunacy, it’s an evil idea.
This is the totalitarian impulse distilled to its purest form. It subordinates our perspective to that of the state, or those who wish to command the heights of state power, which entails the monopoly on physical violence. If all art is political, then the political person can’t help but dictate what forms of expression are permissible for aiding their political project. This is the logic of the propaganda ministry under the Third Reich, the cultural commissar under Stalin, the thunderous Inquisitor, and the hysterical puritan with his torch at the ready. It’s a horrifying way to go through life.
It recalls George Orwell’s despair at the atmosphere that prevailed after WWII, when much of the Western intelligentsia was uncritically pro-Soviet and pro-Stalin. Writing in “The Prevention of Literature,” he noted that “Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to [him] from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth.”
The line “listening to music is itself a political act” still astounds me to this day, as it’s so obviously a statement of desire for power — the power to intimidate, punish, and potentially murder your political enemies who listen to bands with “the wrong politics.”
Three: Ideological Underpinnings of the 2010s Moral Panic
I’ll admit this section feels a little dated in 2025, as the wave of leftism that built up in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street has long since crashed onto the rocks of political reality. But the critique is still worth keeping in mind for when the next wave of activism comes around.
Even if we humor today’s moralizing fanatics, we see how quickly their terrain turns to quicksand. They try to be cute by saying “Oh, but it’s not censorship, because we’re not using the government to punish you! Who’s the snowflake now?” And they’re right. They dress their critiques about “harm” in the red hues of Marxism, while acting out the most bourgeois, market-oriented form of activism: consumer advocacy. It’s activism as consumers for consumers, to comprise a pressure group to rally against the production, selling, and possession of a commodity.
They are Plekhanov’s “precious pillars of bourgeois society,” who “furnish the ‘raison d’etre’ for the most immediately reactionary policy.” You see this in their sick arousal at humiliating individuals for enjoying the wrong book, film or album. It echoes the busybody suburbanites who petition their local movie theater against screening violent movies. They all come from the same class and carry the same motivations; the only difference is the branding.
It’s doubly hilarious considering their ideological model, which smuggles identity politics into dialectical materialism. The idea is that our unjust social relations make up the base of society, which therefore causes and are caused by the superstructure of culture (e.g., entertainment, the arts). While they use this framework to launder their reputations as fighters for the oppressed, it commits them to the highest act of bigotry. It assumes that people with have no ability to think on and interpret art for themselves and are incapable of simply being unaffected by something they read, hear, or watch.
In other words, the problem here is the same one that’s always plagued the application of historical materialism to cultural matters: the discounting of individual agency. The dialectic is a fascinating analytical tool, but not every human thought, action, or utterance can be reduced to the reinforcement, perpetuating, or legitimating of the ruling ideology that reinforces the prevailing relations of cultural production.
Four: The Practical Significance of Engaging (or Not)
This section deals explicitly with consequences. Some people, usually the most obnoxious people you’ve ever known, are keen to declare that consequences aren’t the point. The point is to show the world where you stand and place yourself on the “right side of history.”2
In other words, the intellectual equivalent of jerking off in public to show you’re capable of achieving orgasm.
Who cares what’s “in your heart” or what your “values” are vis-à-vis your engagement with a film, book, or song?3 What matters is what effect it has on the world, which in the overwheling majority of cases, is next to nothing:
Let’s say you did read that book, listen to that song, or watch that film. Did someone from a historically marginalized community magically feel a pang of agony as you turned the pages? Did the victim of some grievous crime relive their suffering the moment you pressed “play”? Did the ghost of past war crimes visit the descendants of its victims as the electrons on the screen came into the view of your eyes? Did anything of real significance occur?
No.
None of this helps anyone except for you, projecting phantoms onto the wall in the service of your own sick narcissism. There are plenty of reasons to feel revulsion at an artist’s personal legacy, which can make it hard to engage with their creative legacy. Everyone has their limits, including myself, but this is a personal question. Furthermore, it doesn’t follow that enjoying an artist’s work signals approval for what they’ve done in their personal life.
Five: The Bigotry of Paternalism
Remember what I said about the Devouring Mother? These are the most relevant passages:
This gets to an idea Stefan Collini wrote about in his excellent little book, That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect. For Collini, “The most important identity we can acknowledge in another person is the identity of being an intelligent reflective human being.” With respect to the arts, “Perhaps egotistical old men shouldn’t be forced to watch Shakespeare’s King Lear, but nor should they have the right to prevent it from being staged because they would find it hurtful. We diminish rather than sustain their autonomy if we try to second-guess what will offend their identity in order to protect them.”
Furthermore:
Patronizing people is wrong. Treating adults from marginalized communities like fragile, helpless children is wrong, as it recreates one of the preconditions of bigotry, that of othering people and holding “the other” to a different moral standard. People don’t need protection from offensive art or art made by bad people. In fact, if you consider an album made by a bigoted monster, what would be a greater defeat than to have people of all other identities listening to his music? His failure is complete, his political project has backfired spectacularly, and most importantly, the art is ours now. The work belongs to us and is relevant to us on our own terms.4
Of course, I’m not ignorant of second-order effects, like how bands with certain reputations and beliefs can attract actually existing danger to their live events. And I addressed that in the article as well:
Group settings can be more complicated: public movie screenings, concerts, etc. In any music scene, for example, the only requirement for entry should be that you like the music and are cool to everyone else. All other barriers should come down, and all should feel welcomed. If people have felt unwelcome before or see something going on that makes them uneasy, we should hear them out and respond accordingly. Incidents should be worked out like adults on a case-by-case basis, and not exaggerated into a “structural” narrative. It’s wrong to scare people by blowing things out of proportion, or to use their identities as raw material for manufacturing your personal brand.
In this sense, while I believe in separating art from the artist, I also understand that when engagement with art scales across social settings — so there needs to be broad agreement on why the separation is necessary.
Leftists are right on this point, we shouldn’t look at an artist with virulent racist views, or one who committed sexual assault, and say “Who cares?” That’s not my argument. My argument is that the person’s creative output should not be verboten because they did or said terrible things. But we should still call terrible things … terrible things, as this helps maintain some guardrails against the second-order effects we might worry about.
Turning My Gaze to the Right
I imagine many conservatives reading this are patting themselves on the back.
Not so fast.
While the right might be less inclined to attack people for engaging with art made by awful people, they have no compunction about launching philistine attacks on art itself.5
A lot of the old arguments against the conservative moral majority still hold as well. Art isn’t a mind control device that magically makes people do things. If you’re an adult, the actions you take after engaging with art or entertainment are your own fault. As for children, they’re the charge of their parents, and it’s morally obnoxious to apply the same level of responsibility to a songwriter, author, or cameraman somewhere else on the planet. That doesn’t mean all forms of violent or sexual media should be available to young children. Casting some shadows and creating some hurdles helps us protect kids while making adulthood more interesting and rewarding.
But artists are not babysitters. They’re not role models. They’re not life coaches, personal consultants, or wellness gurus. A novel is not a play-by-play manual for life. Film crews aren’t representatives of the local health department. Album releases aren’t encyclicals issued from a multi-disciplinary board of HR managers. Some people want art to play these roles in society. They’re wrong.
And they’re still wrong, and will always be wrong.
There are exceptions. But these are as rare as a signed copy of Black Lotus.
::Retching noises::
Do you honestly believe the thoughts and feelings running through me as I listen to “Obsessive Compulsive Dismemberment” have any real consequences for the wider world? Get a life.
In case it’s not obvious, I’m talking about Burzum here. The fact that so many non-whites listen to and love Varg’s music (and quite a lot of outright NSBM that I would never touch) is a clear defeat of his ideology. And it is the best way to disprove any narrative about the music, on its own, “causing harm.” Notions that these listeners are just acting out of “internalized whiteness” or some other form of false consciousness is just another insulting form of the Devouring Mother concept.
At some point I’ll have to talk about conservative outrage about Serano’s Piss Christ. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how the right, along with not understanding art, doesn’t seem to understand the symbolism of Christ’s suffering and death either (he already has nails through his hands and feed and has an open stabwound, he’s already desecrated you morons!)