I personally don’t because I view giving any kind of support as subsidising their problematic views.

no. ian watkins music should burn with him

Some I do, some I don't. Depends on what they did.

Case in point I use Piefed because the dev believes in democracy and human rights.

Usually I'm not in the mood anymore after I get to know some artist is an asshole. It's not like I use my brain and deliberately try to reason about it. Or that I feel hatred towards the book/song now... But I never felt like re-reading Harry Potter after that. Or let Tidal play some artists' songs. The fun is just spoiled, I guess.

Yes and no

Yes insofar as the work really does stand alone - if it was suddenly revealed that Vincent van Gogh was a mass murderer, or a space alien, or a Labrador Retriever, or literally any other thing one might imagine, Starry Night would still look exactly the same.

And no insofar as I don't want my money going to a piece of shit, and to the degree that I can prevent that from happening, I do.

If support of the art is in turn supporting the artist in hurting other people, there is no separation, just a lie we tell ourselves to avoid cognitive dissonance.

If the artist is dead, or otherwise unable to hurt people, then and only then is it possible to separate the two

If the work is being commoditized to promote harmful ideas, then no matter how good the art is, it should be shunned.

If the art is good but the artist used to have problematic views or opinions, then that’s different.

Lindsay Ellis has a nice video about this

It depends. What’s the context? What’s the purpose or goal?

If the goal is to evaluate technical merit or the chemical composition or the audio waves or the pixels, then the artist may be trivial.

If the goal is to establish chains of causality, bolster or undermine moral stances, or simply understand the context of a piece of work, then the artist is central.

Context and purpose are crucial.

I don't think supporting the work really needs to be supporting the artist. I think some folks conflate the 2 and really don't separate it. My personal take is, you can like something like a song or a painting, but that shouldn't mean you then buy the CD or merch. I think once you do that, only at that point are you really supporting both.

However, if the work is political, religious, or economic, and you can't separate that, this is completely understandable on some levels

The key issue I had with this is, is sometimes the work itself is none of those things, but the artist is.

Specifically in the case for a certain magical school and the author of said work.

I don't have time to vet everyone whose work I enjoy. Another issue I have is that if I've enjoyed someone's work for years, and it's become dear to me, am I supposed to just turn that enjoyment off if it turns out they're problematic?

Yes, I'm very "death of the artist". But to me, that mostly means that the artist doesn't get any more say in what a finished piece of art means than anybody else.

If I like a piece of art, but not the artist that made it, that's not a contradiction to me. Bad people can still make great art. Take Ace of Base: I'm never going to give them money, but I still listen to "Cruel Summer". This is a song that is definitely not promoting White Supremacy.

I view art as an open communication of sorts. It can be viewed without knowledge of the person behind it, but in general the more you expose yourself to a person, the better you get to know them. Their styles, values, thought patterns, all of which get baked into the art in a fundamental level.

For that reason, I don't really think you can. You can look at their works from how you engage with them, absolutely, but you can't fully disengage yourself with the idea that someone alive made this. It dehumanises creators, turning them into content machines. You may as well get an AI to start churning out garbage.

It also depends on the nature of what the artist did. I already own all the Sandman books, so reading them doesn’t further help Neil Gaiman, but I don’t think I’d ever be able to read them again anyway. Other artists whose crimes weren’t as horrible, I might be able to pick up again without greatly degrading my enjoyment of the work (although I can’t think of any authors on my shelf off the top of my head that would apply to)

Hol' up.
What's up with Ace of Base?

I do.

Some of the works I admire the most have been written (or painted, or composed,...) by people I don't like, to say the least.

Humans are complex beings.
Culture, social norms (good vs bad) and historical background (what was considered legal and illegal) are also very complex. And the can be very different from one region to the next, and even in the same region from one time period to the next.

While, on the other hand, the action of judging someone else (or some past time) is often lazy as fuck, based on nothing but personal emotions (hate, anger, sadness,... or their exact opposite), distaste (I don't like to see/hear/taste this or that) and preconceptions (I think people should (not) be allowed to do this or that).

You don't believe me? Well, you're absolutely right to not believe anyone, me included, but then just go ask a few racists out there how easy it is to judge (and to hate on) someone based on their race or skin color, or even on their culture and social norms being different from ours... Do we really want to act like racists? I certainly don't, even when it's for other reasons than race, even for 'moral' reasons. Which, btw, is in itself a very changing notion.

I also think no one, me included, is perfect. So, how come should I be allowed to judge and to condemn anyone based on their own imperfections and faults?

Judging should be the job of the judges: people that been educated to fairly be judging (aka by accepting as a fact that anyone accused of anything should be considered innocent until proven otherwise) people's actions based on a set of arbitrary rules (that is the law) and when deemed necessary by punishing anyone that has not respected said rules. Judging should not be my job as an individual, filled with my own emotions and personal biases, nor as a citizen with my own set of values, and it is even less so as an amateur of art (no matter how deeply I may (dis)like some artists).

If the artist is still alive, then generally no. I don’t support any anti-trans artists because their beliefs and sometimes actions harm me and people I care about. It would be hypocritical and privileged of me to not apply that to artists that harm groups I’m not in.

If the artist is dead however, I’m a bit more flexible. A vast amount of historical artists were sexist or racist or bigoted in some way by modern standards. Not to mention the art the created may be constrained by the norms of the time as well. It would be extremely difficult to find a historical artist without something to take issue with and they’re not actively harming anyone anymore.

Its a ridiculous concept, "you have to separate the art from the artist," no we don't, in fact it is actively harmful when we do. You know who never says to separate the art from the artist? The artist. And if that artist harmed people, their victims and families aren't gonna be separating the art from the artist either.

Taking of for granted that people should separate the producer from the product -- gee, where have I heard this before? "Oh, you see, you have to look at things in this narrow way that makes no sense" nobody has to do that. All power and value in society is just people doing stuff, the value of the art is created by the time and energy of the artist, the galleries, the socialites, the critics, etc., thinking of art as just some commodity is atrocious, not to mention, the artists time and expertise is in the art.

No piece of art is known by the people who owned it, inly the artist. Like sometimes theres a "collector" that donates or showcases their collection and you hear about those people. But most of the time, most people, don't give a shit who owned the thing.

Finally, think about it the other way. Would anyone ever "separate the art from the artist" when going to sell it? Picasso produced an immense amount of work, few people could tell the difference between a Picasso and like just a bunch of shapes on a page, arranged a certain way, if they had never seen either one before. Some people might prefer the shapes over the Picasso. So if someone found a Picasso in their grandmas attic, and grandma needed a new Cadillac, would they ever try to not sell the work as a Picasso? Like believing the art itself would stand on its own and grandma would get just as much money marketing the artist as unknown rather than marketing it as a genuine Picasso.

The only time people tell you to separate the producer from the product is when they're fucking you over. I think people just hear it and don't wanna sound like a shitty person for liking Ted Nugent, and so they repeat it. It sounds smart I guess, it often makes people at least pause on it, but in reality bit makes no sense whatsoever, and we don't have to mystify it or acknowledge the view as legitimate.

Somewhat, financially supporting the work of active assholes like JKR or Disney I consider a wrong. If copyright were still 5 years as originally conceived I'd say wait and have at it once it enters public domain, but unfortunately that's no longer an option while retaining cultural relevance in most cases. So yo ho ho I guess.

Another consideration is freedom of speech (or expression), which I support in pretty absolute terms, barring yelling fire in a theater and other exceptions which cause direct harm. An interesting one being 'inciting hatred', which IMO should not be an exception to freedom of speech because the brush is too broad and can be used to silence too much depending on who wields it, especially when applied to art.

Which brings us to the issue of tolerating the intolerant, to which I say we need to foster a society in which intolerance is not accepted, therefore do not tolerate intolerance. If the art is intolerant, say Mein Kampf, the solution is not to ban it, but to do the work to engender a societal hatred (or better a disgust) of Nazis, an active intolerance of intolerance (something the world has dropped the ball on, and we're paying for it).

Separation of art and artist is a complicated question with plenty of meat on the bones. At the end of the day, personally, I still consider Harry Potter a fun, fairly mindless romp (with some questionable themes) which I enjoyed as it came out, but JKR's behavior has certainly put a damper on it for me. I would probably no longer recommend it to a child even to foster reading, it's had its moment and there's better options, say 'A Wrinkle in Time'.

I saw Sleeper as a yout and thought it was funny before I knew anything about Woody Allen as a person. I was old enough to rent that VHS, or however I watched it, but I certainly didn't mean to endorse him. To be fair, I haven't watched it again since.

ETA: This isn't some stance I've taken. This is just an anecdote about how I saw a movie both directed by and starring a person who some may find objectionable. For me at that young age, there was only the art because I was not aware of the artist so there was no "separating" to do. I'm not making any suggestions about what others should do.

The way you describe it would mean that if any movie out there had anybody working on it do something problematic, I shouldn't watch that movie anymore?

Where do you draw the line? Director? Main actor? Side actor? Background actor maybe?

Tom Cruise is a brainwashed sociopath, hate him, but I still watch his movies because I like them, most of them are pretty great

If you can't, you have failed the critical thinking test.

Neither I guess? I hate the expression "separating the work from the artist". It assumes that you can only completely ignore the context or reduce everything to the context. Humans are capable of more than that. You don't even have to actively decide how much you value the context and whether or not you are comfortable with a piece of art. It'll happen automatically.

Regarding not giving support to an artist whose views you strongly oppose, then it's about the product and not the work. There's a huge difference between opposing the power an artist gains from their product and opposing the art itself.

The art is not just the thing - it's impossible to experience it in isolation of it's context which you've constructed from your experiences and feelings and knowledge as well as how the art is situated and framed to you. This might be the point of the Fountain.

So I think it's impossible to separate the work for the artist if you have knowledge pertaining to them. Michael Jackson was an incredible talent, and his music is significant in my memories of my own childhood, but it hits different for me now. If we played his music to an alien freshly arrived from Mars they might think it's perfect, but it never can be again for us.

The songwriter was a neonazi.

yes. and i don't respect people who can't and who want to lecture me on how enjoying anything is bad if it wasn't made by a perfect person.

to me people who think that way are telling on themselves and their lack of skill in critical thinking and their embrace of hypocrisy.

there is no such thing as a harmful idea.

i think you mean 'there are ideas i don't agree with and i don't think should exist'.

It's entirely possible to consume art without benefiting the artist. It's called piracy.

When my grandkids want to watch Harry Potter, JK Rowling doesn't get a penny from the act of me streaming it on an illegal site.

Any idea that if actualized into government policy, that would lead to increased rates of harm for people, is in fact a harmful idea.

ok, so now we're talking about government policies, not ideas.

and only policies that 'harm' people. whatever harm means.... because i'm fairly confident every policy has people it 'harms' and those it benefits. the question is who and how...

So you don't recognize the names of people who make art? If you found a $1m Picasso in an attic somewhere, you would be against telling people it was a Picasso, even when trying to sell it, because you don't respect people who won't separate the art from the artist. You believe that the $1m Picasso would sell for just as much money if nobody knew it was a Picasso, and you wouldn't respect anyone who tried to sell it as a Picasso.

Critical thinking doesn't mean "people need to agree with me" it means you have to actually demonstrate that youve thought about or worked with a topic to such a degree, that your opinions are verifiable and stand up as factual, in many different ways. You have not done this.

Are you an artist in any way? If you made art would you want it separated from you? Like physically stolen from you after you made it, or had your name removed from it? When someone else buys it would you remove your name from the art and put the name of the person who bought it?

Name an artist whose art should be separated from their personal lives, and by just saying the name, you are breaking your own rule. Unless you mean that you should be allowed to appreciate art made by bad people, which like, fine. And if people don't like you because of the art you like, then you have to deal with that too.

Like if someone likes Hitler's paintings, but dislikes his more notorious actions, idk maybe its quirky. But sometimes people say they like Hitlers paintings, because they like the other stuff Hitler did, and thats not okay. If the first person defended Hitlers art to someone whose family was killed at Auschwitz, then they would have to deal with the social consequences of defending that particular opinion to that particular person. That's just life.

Being a critical thinker requires being critical of your own ideas and thoughts. So your statement really comes off like someone who just doesn't want to feel judged for liking something. In fact your comment seems to have very little to do with critical thinking or art, and more about not having respect for people who aren't willing to look past abuse.

exactly. i just had to block a moron who tried to argue with me how wrong i was and how stupid i was for not agreeing with them... when my comment said i don't tolerate people lecturing me about how wrong i am.

something 90% of comments I get here these days are idiots who didn't read what i said and feel the compulsion to lecture me about how stupid I am by putting words in my mouth and arguing against them.

they are basically shadowing boxing against their own imaginations. but a lot of people here are living far more in their own imaginary perfect moral universe and get VERY upset that other people aren't them.

sometimes it's neither, and people read their own beliefs onto things, or they disliked it for a petty reason and need to make up a more substantial reason because they don't want to seem petty to other people.

yes, you're suppose to do that.

that's why it's virtue signalling. you are supposed to signal to your newfound virtue by going through a public denunciation of what you once enjoyed, and you can take it further by declaring how BETRAYED you are by this and how you are retroactively full of guilty and shame for ever having enjoyed their work.

The problem is your a well-adjusted person who doesn't tons of free time to agonize over ranking your moral purity compared to strangers on the internet and post about it on social media, as well as going around harassing others who don't agree with you. Everyone knows 'good' people must go around virtually burning the heretics. And the 'bad' people are the ones who just enjoy their lives without a compulsion to agonizing about everyone's moral standing compared to their own.

The problem is most people here treat it as a moral panic.

If artist is bad, the work is bad, and anyone who likes it is bad. And we plus purge ourselves of this 'badness' at all costs and anyone who associates with it, because it 'infects' you with 'impurity'.

It's not a rational thoughtful thing, it's taking your fear and projecting it into hostility and weaponizing it. Best way to not be judged is to judged others as harshly as possible to deflect any possibility of your own purity being questioned.

It can't just be... a basic feature of life. People are wrong, people make mistakes, art is imperfect, contexts change over time.

I think my favorite part is these are the same people who look back at history 400 years ago and try to morally judge it with contemporary standards... as if the same thing won't be done to them in 400 years...

yes. because the point of the belief is that it's 'icky' and you dont' want any of the 'ick' on you.

and anyone who has any 'ick' on them, knowingly or unknowingly, might get some on you.

it's a moral purity belief structure that assumes the bad ideas/beliefs/actions are somehow transmissible to you.

what about the piece of shit's estate? those their shittness end with their life, or does it perpetuate though their family or other estate holders?

so what happens in 50 years when the people then read your internet comments and find them problematic?

it's not about thinking, it's about not 'feeling yucky'.

and not being around 'yucky people' who are OK yuckiness in life, because they might make you feel yucky.

I don't think anybody's estate is entitled to anything from their work, piece of shit or otherwise.

yes, but legally they hold the rights.

Sorry - I should've been more clear.

Just as I try to keep my money put of the hands of scumbag creators, I try to keep my money out of the hands of any and all of the rentseeking scumbags who didn't create it but try to profit from it anyway, which includes their heirs. It's just that as far as that goes, it doesn't matter whether or not the creator was a scumbag - that's my position in all cases.

Wasn't aware of the accusation. I read some articles, and I'm skeptical. I guess it doesn't bother me either way, I never bought any album from them, and I won't start now.

I dunno. I honestly believe in what I say and try to be respectful and open-minded. I’m only human, I’m sure I’m not perfectly agreeable. If I’m still alive, I imagine I’d be interested in having a conversation with someone who actually cares that much about the old comments of some random person. Maybe I could learn something from that conversation. If I’m dead, then it won’t really matter to me what happens. At least I could die knowing I tried my best.

At least I could die knowing I tried my best.

Right, and who is to say the people you judge weren't trying their best? I'm confident JK Rowling, the favorite punching bag in these threads, is trying her very best.

The irony of so many people these days is they feel INFINITE GRACE should be given to them, but NONE given to others. It baffles my mind.

Ah okay that’s the actual point you were trying to make. I personally don’t expect “infinite grace” nor do I think I deserve it. Also to that point I think if someone were to tell me my stance on something harms someone else and I still remain firm on my stance against that group, I should be vilified. With the passing of time, A consensus will be reached and I will be either right or wrong and I should be judged accordingly.

J. K. Rowling nor I are deserving of “grace” from others simply because either of us are trying our best. That’s just not fair to the people affected by either of us.

Sorta.

Art, or the more general "thing someone has made" that you're referring to, can be judged independently of the person. A terrible person can make beautiful music. Much of our cultural heritage was made by people who are rightfully considered to have problematic views, if for no other reason than they were more common then.

Then there's art as a commercial product. You can't separate the product from the manufacturer. There's no way to give someone you think is bad money that doesn't detract from your statement of disapproval.

Then there's crime and piracy. When it's media piracy I'm pretty ambivalent. Seems easier to just not consume stuff made by people you don't like, but I don't think it's "support" in the way that paying is.
When it's stealing actual physical things, that's just enjoying the good thing and actually costing them money, which is clearly not supporting anyone. That just kinda makes it funny.
At the extreme end is stuff like "that's our confederate flag. We got it when we shot a bunch of confederates and took their flag". Clearly not supportive.