The arts are not the only sphere in which such dilemmas arise. The Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft addressed head-on the incestuous rape and bestial practices of printmaker Eric Gill as part of an exhibition of his work. But in times of greater cultural awareness and sensitivity, curators, arts bodies and festival organisers are changing tack. In the past, much awkwardness around the behaviour of artists, usually male, has gone unaddressed.
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Ted Hughes, who undoubtedly was a serial adulterer, is reviled because of the popularity of his wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath. Orton, however, is often painted as the more troublesome character. Kenneth Halliwell was included in Tate Modern’s recent Queer Art exhibition, but there’s the small biographical detail that he bludgeoned his lover, the playwright Joe Orton, to death. How we respond personally to the character and the context of any given artist also plays a part. It’s why no coffee table books are dedicated to Albert Speer. But this is the art that fascism was literally built on. On a trip last year to Leros in the Dodecanese I was fascinated by the Mussolini-era port of Lakki. At the extreme end is my uncomfortable love of neoclassical architecture or in the Italian, classicismo. Alfred Hitchcock, whose early films I admire, is an acknowledged abuser of women.
Ezra Pound is a favourite poet of mine, but a racist. Perhaps we should regard artists as products of their times, but then a part of me thinks that nothing ever changed when good people did nothing.
Picasso existed in a time and place when attitudes were different. Although works that, in Carr’s words, make a “profound moral statement”, such as Picasso’s Spanish civil war painting Guernica, make it more difficult not to scrutinise the artist’s life and values. It is much easier to take a stand against a morally dubious work of art than the artist. This is something I find myself agreeing with. He suggests a Kandinsky abstract painting has no moral purpose, and asks, if artists we enjoy claim no moral content or purpose to their work: “Why can we not enjoy it without worrying whether they were good or bad people?” “Much art, and especially narrative art, clearly has such a purpose,” he says. He tells me that while some schools of thought maintain that art is never moral, merely aesthetic, many artworks do have a moral element. Wondering whether it makes a difference if the artist’s morals and personality are entwined in their work, I ask David Carr, professor of ethics and education at the University of Birmingham. Should I never mention that Polanski’s The Pianist is a very beautiful film, or that Rosemary’s Baby was influential?
But this wouldn’t hold true for Allen’s films. If the punishment for Weinstein is that he never works again, should I no longer appreciate the films he produced early on in his career, such as Pulp Fiction? Perhaps it’s OK he just funded those films, he was not a key creative. The issue with Allen, however, is apparently the decreasing quality of his films rather than the fact he may have abused Farrow (and married his former partner’s adoptive daughter). Farrow has written a detailed open letter to the New York Times on her experiences. Woody Allen was investigated for the sexual abuse of his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow. But I am furious that while Weinstein has been summarily condemned, Roman Polanski – who raped a 13-year-old, let us not forget – has continued to work and won an Academy Award as recently as 2003. When it comes to moral transgressions, is it possible to separate the artist from the art and should we try? Does it depend on how extreme the ethical boundaries breached are (rape, murder?) or is it the quality of the art that matters, or how closely connected with a particular work the transgressor might be? Do we allow for archaic bad behaviour, mitigate for different times? If we cease to allow artists to continue working after exposure, should we also stop appreciating their oeuvre?Īfter the true monstrosity of Weinstein’s behaviour was made public, I was pleased to see that he had been tossed into the trash. It’s good that at least one president – even if a fictional one – has felt the repercussions of his predatory behaviour
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