The Art and the Artist

Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars #30

On Christmas morning in 1870, Cosima Wagner awoke in the villa she shared with her husband, Richard, and their son, Siegfried, in Lucerne, Switzerland. She was awoken by music coming from outside her door. When she emerged, she found thirteen musicians standing on the stairs, where they were performing the music Richard had written for her birthday the day before. The work, now known as the Siegfried Idyll, is considered one of the most beautiful pieces of chamber music ever written, and this by a man known for his huge-scaled operas.

Here is the Siegfried Idyll:

Imagine awakening to that! Cosima would later describe the experience:

As I awoke, my ear caught a sound, which swelled fuller and fuller; no longer could I imagine myself to be dreaming: music was sounding, and such music! When it died away, Richard came into my room with the children and offered me the score of the symphonic birthday poem. I was in tears, but so was all the rest of the household. (Quoted and translated in David Dubal, The Essential Canon of Classical Music)

Richard Wagner was a great composer from whose pen sprang some of the most amazing, glorious music in history; as an artist he ranks not just at the forefront of composers but of all human artists. Wagner’s work stands alongside Shakespeare’s and Michelangelo’s.

Richard Wagner was also an absolutely horrible human being.

He was a Germanic nationalist who detested France; he was an anti-Semite all his life as well. Richard Wagner died fifty years before Naziism rose, but there is no doubt whatsoever that he would have found great comfort in that regime. Oh, and his wife, Cosima? He met her when he was married to his first wife and she to her first husband. They carried on an illicit affair that was not the least bit secret, and of the Siegfried Idyll, David Dubal (quoted above) writes: “That this man, capable of such emotion, was enraged at Bismarck for not burning Paris to the ground will always tantalize and disturb.”

Richard Wagner: philandering ass and proto-Nazi, and also one of the greatest composers of all time.

The artist and the art.

The question seems to be constantly arising in this period of social media: “How do you separate the art from the artist?” Unfortunately, this question nearly always arises because of a revelation of a bad action in a beloved artist’s life, or because of a viewpoint a beloved artist holds that doesn’t square with our own. Describing the problem this way does seem to cheapen it, I admit. But an awful lot of our identity springs from the art we love: the stories that shaped us, the music that filled our hearts, the things we have watched or looked upon. Finding out that a favorite artist has some troubled views or has committed unsavory acts is always a shock, not just because the person’s famous and we know who they are, but because of the nature of art itself. Art is a personal creation, and so when we learn bad things about an artist, it’s natural to look to the art for signs of those bad things that we might have missed.

And worse, we may even think that to maintain a relationship with that art says something about us.

Is that the case, though? It may well be…but not always, and we should give these things strong consideration.

As I write this, it’s a couple of weeks since a bombshell article hit with detailed allegations regarding the behaviour of author Neil Gaiman. I’m not going to delve into any of those details, except to note that they are bad. Very bad. VERY bad. The degree of predatory behaviour that lies at the center of the Gaiman allegations is truly disturbing. It’s beyond finding out that someone we admire has troubling political beliefs; Gaiman’s accused behaviour is something else, and it puts those of us who have admired his work and whose shelves are partly populated by his books in a difficult position. Do we continue to allow his work space on our shelves? Do we continue to read it?

And do we allow it influence on our own work?

There have been a lot of examples of this kind of thing over the years. Gaiman’s case is particularly nauseating, not only for the nature of the allegations against him but the degree to which the allegations clash with the public image of a beloved artist living his life with a certain degree of openness, a man who leaves behind many stories of warm and pleasant interactions with fans wherever he goes. Yes, his personal life has been something of a mess, but who among us doesn’t have a troubled relationship here or there? For many, Gaiman is simply “Neil”, and to have this happen now, to have these things come to light, is unusually bad.

But there is still precedent here.

The most notable similar case is JK Rowling, the once-beloved creator of Harry Potter, who has in recent years almost completely rebranded herself as a crusader against transgender people. For many this too has been a shocking development for someone who created a franchise that for younger generations is as seminal as Star Wars was for Gen X, and again the soul-searching and scouring of the franchise itself took place: Could we have seen this coming had we paid better attention to the text? And honestly, I have to conclude that I doubt it, even if there are things in the text that can most certainly be criticized.

For me, there’s another, less-notable example that I think I can safely say was never evident in the work. If you grew up in the 1980s you certainly remember one of the earliest notable cooking shows, PBS’s The Frugal Gourmet. This show featured cooking lessons by a former minister named Jeff Smith, and he was quite the franchise himself in the 80s and 90s, producing many cookbooks. I watched a lot of his shows, and I’ve cooked a lot of his recipes. A great deal of my “foundational” knowledge of cooking came from The Frugal Gourmet, and I also found a lot of resonance in his personal views on how food connects to memory and how central food is to fellowship.

And then came the accusations.

Again, I’m not bringing up the specifics here. They’re easily found. The short version is that several individuals came forth with stories of a predatory nature, Smith ended up settling the cases out of court, and his lucrative career came smashing to a halt. Smith himself died in 2004, and he’s mostly forgotten now. His cookbooks can be found very cheaply in used bookstores, since they received huge printings back in the day. I own just about all of his cookbooks since I bought them all in the 90s when I was learning to cook, and I never divested myself of them when his earlier behaviour came to light.

But I have removed all of my Harry Potter books from my personal library, and I’m still undecided as to what I plan to do with Neil Gaiman’s books. What’s the difference?

I suppose the degree of influence is a big one. I learned a great deal about food and cooking from Smith’s books, and his writing shaped how I approach both. I can’t really remove his influence from my cooking, can I? And he disappeared from the public stage before finally passing away of heart disease, so his case becomes something like Wagner’s: ongoing use of his content in no way benefits him in any direct way. And like Smith, Wagner’s influence is baked in…in fact, even moreso, since Wagner’s music stands as some of the greatest human art ever created, and not one note of music composed in the West since Wagner would be the same had he not lived.

JK Rowling has, over the last decade, made being anti-trans her entire reason for living. Everything she does now is filtered through that aspect of her character. She is never in the public eye for any reason other than saying something new and horrible about the particular marginalized group that she hates. This makes it virtually impossible for me to enjoy her work on any level at all, and in fact, seeing her books on my shelf just reminds me anew of how awful she’s been. So away go the books, and obviously, I spend no money at all on anything of hers, whether it’s new books, films, merchandise, whatever. Since she has dedicated her entire life to her anti-trans crusade, any purchase of something with her name on it gives money to her. That’s a non-starter for me.

But why remove the books? Again, because I cannot enjoy them anymore, and the “influence” they’ve had on me is minimal. I encountered Harry Potter for the first time when I was in my late-20s, and thus for me they were entertaining, well-told stories, but not foundational influences of my youth. I do empathize with younger people for whom Harry Potter served a similar role that Star Wars and Star Trek served for me.

For Gaiman, my feelings are similar. His work is work that I admire (and even love), but it’s never been a foundational influence, and the accusations are still new enough that it’s unclear what course Gaiman himself will take moving forward. Also, a lot of what I own of Gaiman’s is in comics: Sandman, several graphic adaptations of his novels. That means that Gaiman is only one artist of several whose work is involved in the complete item. I wouldn’t want to reduce Sandman to just being a “Gaiman” item, and thus erase the work of the visual artists involved.

In the end I think that we all have to pick our “line to cross”, and to judge on an almost individual-case basis as to which lines have been crossed by which individual artists. There are other artists whose work I will not willingly own or consume for one reason or another, and ultimately there is little consistency to be found. “If you refuse to partake in this artist’s work, then why do you still enjoy that one’s work, when what they did is just as bad?” is a question that comes up quite often when one starts going down this particular rabbit hole. It’s a question I’ve grappled with while considering Gaiman and Rowling, and the only answer I can come up with in this particular case is, “The accusations against Gaiman are new, he is already paying a price, his response isn’t totally done yet, and I’m unlikely to follow any new work of his that comes along in the unlikely event any publisher is willing to work with him again. Rowling, on the other hand, is actively using the vast fortunes from her art to actively hurt a community I value.” None of that is particularly satisfying, I must admit.

Then there’s the work itself. One isn’t immediately confronted with Wagner’s anti-Semitism when one listens to his operas, while there are parts of Rowling’s work with uncomfortable content. But even there we run into problems, particularly the “of its day” argument. I am currently reading my way through all of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels, and while I am enjoying them for their strengths (pacing, tension, and sense of setting are big ones), there’s some gobsmacking racism and sexism in play in them as well. (And I know that some homophobia is to come.) Was Fleming a bigot? In some ways, probably. But he didn’t make it his mission in life, so it’s easier to overlook it with a shaking-of-the-head, “Shame he didn’t know better” acceptance when reading him.

These are not new questions, and we’ll probably never stop asking them. HP Lovecraft is another example. My mother, staunch liberal that she was, had a strangely encyclopedic knowledge for which actors and actresses were Republicans and therefore to be avoided. One time I mentioned to her that I had recently watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s (mainly because of my longtime crush on Audrey Hepburn), and she proceeded to tell me in long form about Buddy Ebsen’s politics. He’s in that movie for about five minutes, if memory serves.

We have to know where our individual lines are; and if we can’t tell where the line is, we at least have to know when someone has crossed it. And even then we have to be careful, because if purity gets too hard to attain, then we’ll end up with nothing at all to watch, hear, or read. Humans are messy and we’re all a disappointment to someone, sometime. And with that, having not really reached any kind of concrete insight that’s going to be useful to many, I withdraw.

Exeunt,
—K.