Should We Separate the Art From the Artist? (NSQ Ep. 20) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
"‘There is a long list of artists whose behavior cuts against what most right minded people would consider honorable or decent behavior. I'd like to point out we could easily broaden this good question to sports and politics and commerce. I mean, the founder of IKEA was a Nazi sympathizer as a young man. Does that mean no more ektwerp sofa for me? I mean, no more Swedish meatballs at the IKEA cafeteria?... I mean, the German auto industry was coopted by the Nazis. Does that mean 80 years later that a given person won't drive an Audi or BMW, a Volkswagen? And then you have to ask yourself, if you consider an action like that, who exactly is it rewarding? And who is it punishing, if anyone?’
‘There might be some legitimate dividing line, when you think about an artist and their art, because it's typically one artist, and their art. So trying to separate Michael Jackson from his music is harder than a former chair of the board of a large corporation, and the product of that corporation’...
‘The strong case might be made for art and artists, and then weaker and weaker cases as you progress from that, too. Oh, did you know that the Rhodes Scholarship was founded on blood money?’
‘Did you know that everything was founded on blood money? If you go back far enough’
‘I would argue that yes, as you've said, it does make sense to connect a person and their work, particularly in the realm of art, particularly if the work they're known for is strongly associated with who they are. So Woody Allen. For many years, Woody Allen made films about funny nebushi guys from Brooklyn who dated and married much younger women.’
‘I was gonna say, who had a thing for like, the Margot Hemingways of the world who were not yet legally able to drive’
‘And for making arguments to those characters that they should kind of abandon all of their agency and just do what he wants them to do.’
‘Right’
‘If you listen to R Kelly's music, you can't be that shocked when you learn that he's been charged with sexually abusing underage women, because that's what a lot of the music entails… I just see so much hypocrisy around this issue. I think a lot of us, if an artist or a politician or an athlete is someone we like, and they are accused of doing something bad, we tend to dismiss the bad behavior. We rationalize it, we make the convenient argument that you should separate the art from the artist. Bill Clinton, for instance, remains a standard bearer for the Democratic Party. And I've heard very few Democrats make much of his historic behavior toward women.’
‘So we have motivated reasoning. We're going to try to get ourselves to a conclusion that we like because it jives with our political ideology or because we want that IKEA fold out bed’...
'One of the very first scientists who studied outliers and achievement was Francis Galton. And so if you want to give the history of the study of human excellence, you kind of have to start with Francis Galton who in 1869, catalogued the achievements of great athletes and great musicians, etc… he was a eugenicist… he really had these incredibly bigoted and racist views of why certain groups of people perform better than others. The very term eugenics can be dated to Francis Galton. Now to be morally consistent. If you say not to listen to certain artists whose work is representative of their own terrible personal moralities, then can you throw out Francis Galton, he really gave social science the idea of a correlation. And I'm pretty sure we don't want to do away with statistics.'
‘Yeah, I mean, another example that is getting into the public consciousness these days is about the origins of the American environmental movement. William Vote was one of the chief movers of that. And he was, in retrospect, what would today be called a white supremacist to the end’...
‘What about Shakespeare?... He wrote Merchant of Venice. Harold Bloom, maybe the most prominent literary critic of the past generation at least, he called Merchant of Venice, a profoundly anti semitic work and most people who study that kind of thing would agree. So does that mean that I should give up all my Shakespeare? Do I really want that?... It's the slippery slope argument. There's a philosopher named Janna Thompson. She's at Latrobe University in Australia, she's made an argument against cancel culture. Here's what she wrote: if the character of the artist becomes a criterion for judging art than the door is open to the exclusion of artists because they belong to a despised group or because they have said or done things that many people do not like’...
‘I will make one last argument against canceling just generally. Let's go back to politics for a second. So one thing I personally find suboptimal about the American two party duopoly, is that it essentially forces people to go all in on either the red team or the blue team. If you want to be blue, you got to be all blue. If you want to be red, you got to be all red… no mixing and matching of policy… is really allowed. But think about that for a second. What are the odds that if you are a Democrat, you wholeheartedly agree with every Democratic position? Same for Republicans. Let's say you loved Barack Obama… So you probably think that every policy decision he made was pretty much great. And the ones that you thought at the moment weren't great, you tend to forget about those. And let's say you hate Donald Trump. You're likely to think everything he does or will do is terrible. But what are the odds that that's actually true?’
‘What are the odds that the Democratic platform, for example, is right on every single issue and that the Republican Party is wrong? Or the reverse? Odds are pretty low’...
‘That's the kind of doctrinaire cancellation that in my view, harms the political process more than anything. This deep, deep, deep, self siloing. So I would say that, yes, we probably should learn to separate the politician from the policy and the art from the artist. I would take it as a sign of maturity, a sign of thoughtfulness and consideration, and I'm in favor of all of those things, for the record’...
‘One puzzling fact about suicide, is that suicide, not universally, but often tends to rise along with prosperity. So this would seem to be puzzling, at least it was to me when I first began to read this literature. But it turns out that, you know, this is what one suicideologist calls the no one left to blame theory of life. That if you live in very difficult circumstances, or have a very difficult personal situation, whatever, you can always imagine that things will get better and that you will be happier. Whereas if you have prosperity, and you see other people like you are thriving, and you're not, there is no one left to blame’"