The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.
> The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible?
It's an interesting conundrum isn't it?
H.P. Lovecraft is a case in point - Lovecraftian horror is a special sort of literary genius, in my opinion, and massively influential on other writers to this day (I'm a big fan of The Laundry Files, for instance, which draw on it). But it's clear that he was massively racist, and significantly more so than just "well those were the times". Some people (some people here in this thread) say that we should "separate the art from the artist", but there's quite a bit of veiled and not-so-veiled racism in the art as well. Not to forget the misogyny.
So we decide to disavow him? No Cthulu for anyone! Well, that doesn't seem like a good option either. There's no easy, feel-good answer here other than to understand that flawed people sometimes create great art, to understand we don't have to (probably shouldn't) make idols of artists, and to be nuanced in our appreciation of their output.
In this vein I did enjoy reading "Lovecraft Country" a while ago, which both explored the horror of racism and embraced mythos-style themes.
Scott Adams gave us Dilbert. In the 90s I found it amazing. By the 00s I'd stopped paying attention, and then he started saying some somewhat less wonderful things which, if you squint, you could see foreshadowed in how uncharitable he was to people in his earlier writings. Another imperfect human, who gave us some good fun and insight, and in the end didn't live up to everyone's expectations. We shouldn't gloss over it, but perhaps we shouldn't pile those expectations on them anyway.
I had a decent lunch at Stacy's that time though...
Growing up as a devout religious kid in the 80s, it was always understood in my household that rock stars were lascivious, immoral sex crazies and that Hollywood was a den of heathen propaganda. Nevertheless, we still listened to (some) music and watched (some) movies.
I'm mostly out of that environment now, but occasionally put myself in those shoes again and think how odd it would seem to me that people look up to and expect moral righteousness from these people.
I think most people recognize more states that 'moral righteousness' and 'immoral heathen'. I don't expect, e.g. christian bale to spend his life volunteering in a food pantry and washing prisoner's feet.
I do expect him not to rape, murder, commit fraud, and so on.
One of the things I occasionally notice about conversations in this area is that some people care more about actions that hurt people than property.
If our hyopthetical rockstar trashes a hotel room, wrecks his car and then has a heart attack from cocaine, that might be judged differently than one that joins the local nazi party and attempts to murder someone.
You are effectively pointing at the Overton Window. For your socially conservative household, almost everyone in the world lived outside of that local Overton Window.
Air Shaffer does a stand-up bit where he says that society gives a pass to extreme artists because we value their art and we don’t really care about (or we downplay) the other aspects of their life.
Art is relatively low stakes. We can always create more art. You should increase the stakes as a thought experiment.
The person who solved global warming/cancer/whatever turns out to be a terrible person? Should we throw away their work, and come to a different answer? Or wait a few generations so people forget and come to the same answer again but the people involved are “pure”?
There is some art that, to some people, is as important as anything else in their lives. For some, the stakes are that the artist who made the art that made them want to keep living after, say, being sexually assaulted, was himself credibly accused of serial sexual assault.
I’m not advocating a decision here, but I wouldn’t call that low stakes.
We can't just throw art away. Once it's there, it is part of everyone who read/saw it. The idea of doing this (eliminating art from history because we don't like its creator) is not only nonsensical, it is also one step closer to fascism.
Factual work remains true regardless of who discovered it. If they actually found the solution to global warming or cancer, then fine. It remains true and useful regardless of the person. But you might want to consider how to not pay them royalties for it.
The problem with unethical behavior in sciences is that you have to check - which you should be doing anyway, but once someone has been exposed as a fraud the community as a whole needs to go back and clean out all the fraud by checking all their work. Unethical behavior in someone's personal life doesn't necessarily invalidate that.
Although I don't see many people talking about ReiserFS these days.
For individual people I don't think all art is just throwaway like that. Iconic music like Kanye or Michael Jackson were part of people's happy memories and experience living. They left a lasting impact on music and pop culture.
For your thought experiment, I don't think we as a whole threw away the scientific work of the nazis. We have a concrete answer to that
I don’t think people are always aware of just how much stuff is built by really terrible people or on the backs of really horrible things.
Sure, some people take art seriously. But throwing it away is super easy. You don’t alter your quality of life much if you burn all your Harry Potter books even if that was a defining part of your childhood. Removing technology from your life on the other hand is hard. Doing something that has little consequence to your life is kinda meaningless in the scheme of things.
Fritz Haber has entered the chat. His first paragraph sounds pretty solid:
>Fritz Jakob Haber (German: [ˈfʁɪt͡s ˈhaːbɐ] ⓘ; 9 December 1868 – 29 January 1934) was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is important for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives.[4] It is estimated that a third of annual global food production uses ammonia from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this food supports nearly half the world's population.[5][6] For this work, Haber has been called one of the most important scientists and industrial chemists in human history.[7][8][9] Haber also, along with Max Born, proposed the Born–Haber cycle as a method for evaluating the lattice energy of an ionic solid.
The second paragraph gives the context:
>Haber, a known German nationalist, is also considered the "father of chemical warfare" for his years of pioneering work developing and weaponizing chlorine and other poisonous gases during World War I. He first proposed the use of the heavier-than-air chlorine gas as a weapon to break the trench deadlock during the Second Battle of Ypres. His work was later used, without his direct involvement,[10] to develop the Zyklon B pesticide used for the killing of more than 1 million Jews in gas chambers in the greater context of the Holocaust.
The art was good. I remember Cat Stevens disappearing from the airwaves when Yusuf Islam emerged. You might feel differently about the art based on how it connects to the post-revelation artist. Michael Jackson was close to a genius. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
It doesn’t help that Yusuf Islam called for the murder of Salman Rushdie live on TV, which connects his odiousness to his work in a way the other artists transgressions often aren’t.
"His odiousness" was less a personal jihad to see Rushdie killed and more the end result of ill considered comments about what different systems of law state after being drawn in and questioned on the contentious issue live.
I have no feelings about him either way. I've read thru Islam's statements and gotten the best context I can. The adjective I would apply to all of it is hapless.
More than anything, Islam seems ill equipped to handle these matters. And to be fair, he indicated he is not the guy to come to for this topic.
I would bolster that to say that if someone truly wanted a substantive, educated opinion about fatwa, they would have gone to someone capable of giving them that.
The context for one of the two(?) TV statements on air was Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals.
Great TV factual, devilish, host led open panel discussion about hair trigger dilemmas of real life and law staged by an international QC (now KC) and human rights lawyer.
It was literally about exploring the gap between written law, law as practicied, morals and ethics, and circumstances that would test anyone.
Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam was a typical guest .. an everyman of no particular deep study into such things, just one of many on the Clapham omnibus.
Taking anything said by anyone on that particular show, sans context, as a literal statement of their core personal belief is tenuous at best.
Nonsense. Yusuf Islam is a Sunni Muslim and the fatwa wass issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shia cleric. So there was no reason for him to recognize the fatwa as legitimate, and he literally said "He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear – if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."
There is no ambiguity here, Yusuf Islam called for Salman Rushdie's killing over a book that a Shia cleric claimed insulted the prophet. A book I might add that neither of them ever read. Later that year he again said Rushdie should be killed in a different context.
Only nonsense from a hard core fundementalist PoV really.
Any notion why you have such a PoV?
In the TV context it was clearly a rhetorical / hypothetical statement .. one of the two utterances was literally on a show titled "Hypotheticals" .. which I guess you watched along with reading the Qur'an, numerous commentaries, reading Rushdie's book, etc.
according to wikipedia "it was just a joke bro" lol, at the time during the show, did anybody laugh? If its the video I just watched, nobody was laughing.
In a statement in the FAQ section of one of his websites, Islam asserted
that while he regretted the comments, he was joking and that the show was
improperly edited.[94]
I just don't see how the video I watched could have been editted in such a way that would misconstrue the words I just saw mouthed by this guy.
> I just don't see how the video I watched could have been editted ..
The video you linked has been edited twice .. once from raw live footage in order to create the TV panel show that went to air, and again a second time to extract and join short specific sections from the TV show to create the segment you linked .. with additional voice over added.
The original TV footage appears to have been sourced from Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals.
The very name "Hypotheticals" might indicate to you how you the second round of editing has led you astray.
The segment you linked has removed all context .. there is nothing of Geoffrey Robertson setting up a situation and instructing panel members "to imagine they are ...".
All you have there is a tight segment lacking the larger context with an added voice over claiming that this is Islam speaking from his heart as himself, nothing about being asked to play himself as a more fundemental true believer.
I have already read the "Hypotheticals". Is he saying God is merely a "Hypothetical"? Is that even allowed with Islam, or was he just cosplaying the Islam part at the time? hehe I liked steve martins take on that egyptian thing, so as a "hypothetical" or as a "joke" yeah I dunno man, those words he mouthed just don't seem to go away.
another edit, steve martin's "king tut", now thats cosplay. Maybe whatever his name was trying to be serious as hypothetically speaking while simultaneously joking about terminating somebody's metabolism in a non consensual manner.
last edit:
I checked on whether cosplay is haram, it is not according to "gemini", can any humans verify this? I'd hate to get killed because I listened exclusively to "gemini" because these AI's are "hallucinators" or whatever tech bro's call it nowadays haha so indeed he could cosplay, be actual Muslim, be joking and hypothetical all at the same time so maybe you're right.
Which "he"? Islam|Stevens or Robertson .. in either case, no, God being Hypothetical was not a central thesis of the show although it's likely something that was bantered about somewhere in the course of at least one of those scenarios.
Maybe look through the transcripts for some mention of any God(s).
> hehe I liked steve martins take on that egyptian thing
I confess I'm unsure as to how Steve Martin (Banjo playing comedian slash actor Martin?) ties into this .. but yes, Hypothetical is a partially scripted staged drama that explored tricky situations, Trolley Problems, and difficult judgements that creep up on people at the edges of law and morality.
The host literally assigned real people "personas" that matched some aspects of that persons real life experience and then asked them to react as their persona through a series of increasingly conflicting and escalating events of the sort that often end up in court.
What ever Cat Stevens is doing there in the show he is absolutely not independantly taking the stage on his own to declare a Fatwa on Rushdie and to call on all Muslims to hunt him down and punish him .. which was the original up thread claim about his behaviour.
so ok I get all of what your saying except what you're leaving out, what was the hypothesis?
Honestly, I doubt either of us will have our minds changed but I do like the guys own explanation
"In response, Yusuf Islam said that some of his comments were "stupid and offensive jokes" made in "bad taste," while others were merely giving his interpretation of Islamic law but not advocating any action."
Honestly, that really is probably the closest I'll get to a satisfying explanation, ie., I came into this thread thinking "Yusuf" done goofed and I'm pretty sure I'm going to leave the thread with an unchanged opinion.
the steve martin bit is how to do a proper cosplay. nobody is taking steve martin out of context lol
> so ok I get all of what your saying except what you're leaving out, what was the hypothesis?
These shows by Robertson had no single scenario, each started with (say) news that people in a cafe had been taken hostage by a unknown assailant .. and built from there. First one guest representing law and order might be asked what their response would be, then they are informed that demands have been made to release convicted terrorists (say). This might build and involve a diplomat, a former singer in the public eye pressed for comment, etc.
I haven't said as I literally last watched the one in question some forty years ago.
Perhaps you can fill us all in given, as you said above, you've read the transcripts and hopefully still have a copy you can look up.
> the steve martin bit is how to do a proper cosplay
We certainly don't hide it away from the public ever being able to (legally) see it again. That's what the Simpson's rightsholders did when they removed the episode Jackson guest starred in from streaming services.
People also like to be selective about which artists they try to memoryhole. John Lennon was a wife beater, an adulterer, and a deadbeat dad but people still love his music (though I personally think his solo career was worse than Paul's).
It's more interesting to not separate them while they are living even if you still enjoy the art. You know exactly where the money is going if you continue to pay
I don't really have an opinion on Wagner's music because he is dead. Michael Jackson similarly feels fine.
But it feels more and more terrible to stream Kanye, a contender for one of the best in producing and rapping, every time he opens his mouth because you know you're helping support his life style. But if you ripped his albums you can still enjoy the previous art.
But it's nice to know more about the riches finances and we should demand more. Papa John's fired their CEO for being racist, but he still holds significant stock, so I continue to avoid their pizza. Tesla could do the same and hopefully it still shouldn't matter without a complete sell off.
Do we know for a fact that Michael Jackson did anything wrong? On Wikipedia you can read that the original accuser suspect his son was being molested, and asked for money or he would go to the police. Doesn't this undermine the credibility of the accuser?
> Chandler demanded money from Jackson, threatening to go to a criminal court, but no agreement was reached. After Jordan told a psychiatrist that Jackson had molested him, the Los Angeles Police Department began a criminal investigation. The investigation found no physical evidence against Jackson.
Update, I just read that entire page and it seems obvious the whole thing was a set up.
Understand and it and celebrate the art when acknowledge the shortcomings of it creator. A lot of great creations, inventions and discoveries are made by otherwise insufferable assholes. Kary Mullis, the inventor of PCR is known to be a prime one. You can’t stop using PCR in biology just because the character of the person who discovered it.
Many painters, singers, composers and CEO’s are known to be horrible people. Unless they are actively harming humanity with the power they acquired, this is nothing
more than a curiosity that is only relevant for people around him.
The more interesting question is: what do we do with the art of people who were revealed to be terrible? I first saw people wrestle with this idea for Michael Jackson and recently it has been a big issue related to Kanye West.