The ethics of fandom

Sean Combs has been arrested in Manhattan after a grand jury returned charges that apparently include racketeering and sex trafficking. This reminded me of a conversation I had on the internet yesterday with a friend about Michael Jackson. This friend has remained aggravated with me for, probably ten years ago now, describing Thriller as slick and soulless — he considers Michael Jackson one of the greatest pop musicians ever, and this judgment convinced him that I was trying to be the Jack Black character in High Fidelity, as he found my apparent contrarianism deeply offensive. (I told him I’ve always sincerely loved the Jackson 5 but this was not a sufficient concession to the genius of Michael).

Anyway, our conversation yesterday was not about that, but rather about his deep ambivalence about continuing to adore Michael Jackson’s music, now that there’s so much evidence that Jackson was a child molester. He’s really torn on the issue, which of course arises all the time. Chinatown and Annie Hall are among my favorite movies, Yeats (addled reactionary with some fascist leanings at the end of his life) is probably my favorite poet, I love me some Led Zeppelin (Jimmy Page procured himself a 14-year-old girlfriend from a sea of groupies) etc etc.

This came up briefly in class yesterday in the context of a discussion of what to make of authors’ interpretations of their own work, and I discovered that exactly one student had seen Annie Hall, which isn’t surprising at all to me — it’s 47 years old! — but still filled me with a certain ineffable melancholy. (I was referencing the scene in which the Woody Allen character produces Marshall McLuhan, who needless to say nobody had ever heard of, to debunk the pompous Columbia professor).

My own orientation towards this subject, which I’m not claiming ought to be anybody else’s, is that while I would of course prefer that artists I admire not be notably bad people outside of their art, it somehow makes no difference to me whether they are or not in terms of my enjoyment of their work. This does not, I should emphasize, mean that artistic talent or genius should cut anyone any sort of break with the legal system, or in terms of being held accountable for their political commitments and so forth. It’s just a comment on my own capacity to completely separate the art from the artist, which again I’m not arguing is a good or a bad thing in and of itself.

Things get trickier I admit when the artist’s work turns out to be intimately related to his deplorable tendencies. I’m a lot uneasier about laughing at Louis C.K.’s sex jokes now for example. It’s a complicated subject.

One thing I do want to take a stand on is that I hate the tendency so many people have to claim that somebody whose work they admired actually was never very good, once it’s discovered that the person is a rapist or a Trump supporter or what have you. This is what I believe a noted country music critic has referred to as “aesthetic Stalinism,” and it should be resisted on at least aesthetic if not political grounds.