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Can you enjoy art, or music from people you disagree with politically or morally?

13K views 61 replies 39 participants last post by  Varick 
#1 ·
For instance: Wagner, wrote a lot of great music, however was a big racist, Debussy, was just an all around unpleasant person, who happened to write good music. Poe was as well, seemed to like criticizing anyone and everything that wasn't his. You get the idea I hope of what I am asking, I personally can listen to anything that sounds good, and quite often do. What about yourself? Even if the person has been dead for 200 years can you appreciate someones work if you know they were the worst person ever? (In your eyes) Or is the art what is important?
 
#2 ·
Some recent threads focusing on political and religious issues related to music have digressed away from music and into purely religious or political discussions. We deleted many of the posts and closed several threads. Please remember that posts in the forum should not be purely political or religious.
 
#4 ·
Kant can, Hegel cannot! The question is: is art just art or is it something more? Neither point of view is stupid.
 
#14 ·
Gesualdo,

I agree with you to me as well I don't care personal issues. There is little problem with me now modern artist, I can't help myself. I do not admire whom walking just for money,giving any sort of advice and make too much money. Sorry to say but some art stories make me unhappy and of course is nothing we can do about that.
 
#8 ·
I have a better question: if you listened to a string quartet without knowing the author and formed an opinion about it, and then someone told you it had been composed by AH, would that first opinion change?
 
#11 · (Edited)
I've thought a good deal about this over the years, and read on music as well as other areas such as history. While I don't think that knowledge of many of the less than positive aspects of composers' personalities, politics and behaviors towards their fellow human beings detracts from my enjoyment of their music, neither do I attempt to whitewash them and put them on pedestals as if they where removed from reality.

In some respects, its perhaps better to know less than more about composers' lives, because the more I find out the more off putting things there tends to be. There are some composers I'd barely call human, even though they where great composers. There are quite a few whose ideologies or ways of thinking about music, however eloquently expressed, I find has little or nothing to do with reality and more to do with power games between rivalling composers or their cliques.

At the same time there are quite a few who I'd be comfortable with calling humanitarians. Not many but enough to make a list of.

There are also composers of whose lives outside the bare basics we know little about, or who have large gaps in their biographies.

Bottom line is that composers and musicians are (and where) people just like us. They had their strengths and weaknesses in terms of character and other things. They had things that they could be proud of, and also things that are things that are negative aspects of their lives.

Having said all that, the music is what matters, or has to matter. I realised if I moralize too much about who or what I am listening to, I would be listening to very little in terms of music, and this applies to classical music more than the other genres. More often than not, ideologies are little more than cloaks to hide personal power games between composers (even if we try to ignore politics and so on and restrict ourselves to music).
 
#16 ·
Morally? Like what? It depends......
 
#19 · (Edited)
From what I know so far about Kant he was racist and sexist:

"a woman is little embarrassed that she does not possess high insights; she is beautiful and captivates, and that is enough ... Laborious learning or painful pondering, even if a woman should greatly succeed in it, destroys the merits that are proper to her sex."

And he listed the characteristics of different nationalities and races regarding their appreciation of the sublime and beautiful. He said the English, Germans and Spanish can appreciate the sublime ( the noble and terrifying such as storms, mountain tops and night-time, and more noble feelings like courage and honesty); and the French and Italian are more concerned with the splendid sublime (pretty, beautiful non-threatening things like flowers and characteristics like artfulness and flattery). The noble and terrifying sublime are more virtuous than the splendid sublime so he didn't think that highly of the. French and Italians. The Dutch he says have no fine feelings and the Japanese share some high feelings with the English, but not much. He says there is something grotesque about the Chinese and their art and the Indians and their religion. The Arabic are truthful and hospitable and Persians are the "the French of Asia" so he thinks they are both reasonably ok. But the "******* of Africa have by nature no feelings that rise above the trifling."

I find this laughable and just a product of the time he was living in. I am not offended by his racism or sexism as it was so long ago. I still find his philosophy interesting and will continue to read more about him.

There was a thread about this question recently. For me it's not so bad if they lived a long time ago. If they are a contemporary-ish artist then it depends what the moral or political issue is exactly, and how much I like their music or art I suppose. The composer Gesualdo was a murderer but I doubt that would put anyone off his music, as it's so far removed being like 350 years ago.

I don't like the racial stuff Eric clapton said but still listen to his music. Whereas the opera singer who was homophobic that was mentioned on the other thread, I doubt I would give the time of day to. She does have an amazing voice, but so do many other singers.
 
#20 ·
If the work is highly charged, it will be controversial and is bound to offend some people, like Robert Mapplethorpe's sexually explicit photographs.

This applies to music, if it has lyrical content, or expresses some sort of social mileu or social identity which some might find different, foreign, strange, immoral or in some way unsavory. This could apply to any music, because art expresses its social environment.
 
#22 ·
#25 ·
I have no problems with listening to any type of music regardless of the composer's background honestly. I avoid being judgmental.
 
#27 ·
That depends on specifics, not generalized labels designed to stigmatize.

Henry Cowell is a good example; he was stigmatized because he was gay, and was discovered with some underage teenage boys in consentual activity; and further stigmatized for being an ex-con. Yet, he was one of America's most important composers. There is a biography now.

And please note that the terms "rapist" and "sex offender" could refer to an 18 year-old boy with a 17-year old girl. I think this country has become over-criminalized.
 
#28 ·
I enjoy The Sopranos quite a bit as a show but I dislike Tony Soprano the lead character. That's a pop culture example of how much I'm willing to enjoy works by people that I find problematic.
 
#31 ·
I think that usually people regard music as something highly individual, something that is above social concerns and to be enjoyed in the privacy of one's own head. It might even be seen as an indicator of strongess: to be able to put those irrational feelings aside and just enjoy the thing in itself.

How I see this is that this view that stresses individuality is at odds with the - I think ecologically valid - view that music is at it's core social, shared, synchronization with other people. Now there's this conflict: on the other hand our culture strongly emphasizes the individuality of musical experience; on the other hand we can't escape the fact that musical experiences are social, shared, a kind of connection to the composer and performer. When someone presents the question whether you would listen to a string quartet by Adolf Hitler, these two views are in a conflict: we would like to act in a culturally approved way and show the strongness and individuality everyone expects from us, but at the same time we don't feel comfortable with having a emotional connection to Adolf Hitler.

This connection, if one exist, has to be in a sense "virtual". Obviously when one listens to, say, Schubert, one can't directly be connecting to Schubert. I would think it is something akin to looking at a movie: we are not dealing with real objects but representations of those objects: the actors are not really present, the actions are not really happening, it's all just dots on a computer screen, but still the emotional connection can be almost as strong as with real people. A CD is just a mechanical reproduction of something that has happened in the past: we don't, at least usually, think that we would be listening to our speaker elements - although their transduction of electrical activity into air pressure waves is the direct acoustical reason for our experience. We would say that we are listening to Schubert (performed by someone).

These mental objects are obviously abstractions. The most obvious reason is that no one here - I'd guess - has ever met Schubert, so no one can concretely know what kind of a person Schubert was. But even if one had a time machine and could go back in time and meet Schubert - would that really change the situation? Isn't every shared experience always in some way abstraction, a part of the whole experience? If someone could share her WHOLE experience with someone, I guess the one with whom she would be sharing the experience should be the exact same person who is sharing the experience - herself. Only parts of our experience can be shared and in that way we are always connecting with abstractions.
 
#33 · (Edited)
I do it all the time, as an atheist I have lot's of religious works that I enjoy a great lot. My favourite composer is and always will be J.S. Bach and his cantatas and his Passions are works I relish. And they can move me too, in a contextual sense, like for me the bible or religion is something of which I can see the beauty. The stories are beautiful and can be read as a more universal telling, transcending the "read it as if it is a fact and believe it." Lots of the stories can just be read as an example of or a manifestation of the or a human condition. Of course this is also very true for paintings / sculptures. Regarding politics, I really like Wagner's operas and do not listen to them with a connotation of his (alleged) dubious politics, the same way I enjoy Shakespeares "The merchant of Venice", which is not free of anti-semitism.

My values and what I use to try to guide me life are not founded in religion, but rather in (carefully chosen) parts of Western Philosophy. However there are philosophers that I find intriguing and whose ideas I enjoy reasoning about, yet don't "believe" or "accept" - I really don't know how to express that - "can not implement in my own sense of logic." So I make a selection there, too.

Kant said - and I read Kant more in Dutch and a bit in German, so this is a quick quotation from a this site: "Art can be tasteful, yet soulless." I for myself am not entitled to the opinion that for a piece of art to have soul I would have to agree with it's values. The soul of art (I suppose that is what we can describe as the enjoyed thing) comes from a contra rational place.

--
Disclaimer: I don't know if this makes sense. Having a bit of trouble with English not being my first language or the language I express quite complex ideas in on a daily basis
 
#36 ·
In general, sure. I can think of a few cases where I might want to avoid certain art on the grounds of distaste towards the artist.

If the art itself is an expression of the thing about the artist I don't like, then I might stay away from it. Some film buffs really like The Birth of a Nation, I'm told, but I don't think I'll ever watch it. Similarly, some people see Wagner's operas as an expression of his anti-semitism. I disagree strongly in most cases, but I can see why somebody might want to avoid him for that reason. I can't say Hans Sachs' "foreign tricks" speech is my favourite part of the Canon.

I'm also sometimes hesitant to pay for works of art if I think the artist might do something with the money I would rather they didn't. There are authors whose books I won't buy for that reason. The composers I like tend to be safely dead, however, so that doesn't come into play much.
 
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