@Pandora said in Separating Art From Artist:
breaking some sacred rule they haven't come up with yet
I don't usually agree with Pandora, but I agree with this. Despite may vocal voices to the contrary, there is not an objectively wrong belief or practice. For every argument against, there is almost always an equally valid argument for. Which makes them entirely subjective, even if we find them incredibly distasteful by current perceptions. Every culture has some kind of practice or belief that later cultures find abhorrent in some way, and try to go back and demonize them -- even though those practices were widely accepted at the time, even believed to be commanded by the gods in some cases.
In the not-too-distant future, someone is going to look back at something that we thought perfectly normal and justified and go on just as big a rant about that thing as we do today. We don't even have to look back that far. We're already throwing most of the nineties under the bus.
Pretending that we're some omniscient objective observer, and trying to retroactively apply contemporary standards to the past and force it to conform, is a ludicrous endeavor that's more damaging than helpful. You can change what happens right now. Not what happened a thousand (or thirty) years ago. Art, by definition, tends to be a distillation of a culture's symbolic beliefs, so some future generation is always going to find it problematic somehow. It's just the nature of the beast.
