Bury Your Idols

We can't control how those we admire behave, but we can choose how we respond to it.

Content warning: discussion of sexual assault, domestic violence and genocide

I’ve been trying to write this post for months, but every time I come close, I find myself hesitant to continue. It’s obviously a really difficult subject, something I know a lot of us feel conflicted about, and something that inevitably crops up into online discourse at least every few months:

How do you reconcile your admiration for someone who has just been outed for behaviour that is, by its nature, morally irreconcilable?

The thing that prompted me to try to collect my thoughts on the subject was the news back in March of actor Jonathan Majors’ arrest for alleged domestic violence. While no means a diehard fan of Major’s work I have enjoyed things he has been in and know I am not alone.

Given his status as a significant up and coming blockbuster star, set in motion to play the part of the MCU’s next big meta-level supervillain, the news obviously came as a blow to those who have remained invested in his work.

Now, obviously looking back no one is going to care too much if Majors gets recast, and given the severity of what he’s been accused of, it’s a no brainer to remove him from our hearts and let him fade into irreverance. He was good, but not *that* good. The same is true for any person of note facing the consequences of their actions.

Noone is shedding a tear that convicted serial rapist Danny Masterson no longer gets to show off his comedy prowess. It’s fine to abandon the in-retrospect-deeply-problematic stand up of public onanist Louis CK. Most folk are quite happy never hearing about anti-trans activist JK Rowling and her dreadful books ever again.

It’s easy enough to do the right thing when you are not so emotionally invested in a particular artist’s work. Where things become more difficult is when its that special someone. An artist whose work really speaks to you; who has delivered something that mattered to you, that sang to your very soul.

You’re invested.

You love them.

They let you down.

While far from the most important consequence of the recent campaign of violence committed by the Israeli Defence Force against the people of Palestine, I found myself frequently bummed out by just how many established public figures from the arts were happy to play cheerleader for what is in no uncertain terms an ethnic cleansing being perpetuated by a colonial ethnostate that is younger than my father.

Statements of support for Israel ranged from a simple condemnation of Hamas’s October 7th attack that could maybe be read with good intentions to outright genocidal rhetoric from folk who are smart, talented, educated and should really know better. The result has left me wondering if there is any point to investing any time or energy into the creative output of strangers if there’s a risk that all it leaves you is a dreadful feeling in the pit of your stomach.

Part of the great complexity of modern online culture is that we now know more about everything than we have ever done before. This is a benefit to humanity in some regards, as it helps us to divorce ourselves from the fallacies and falsehoods of largely cartelisated state media outlets.

But the other side of this coin is that we now know way too much about the lives, the behaviours and politics of the people who create the things we enjoy. Sometimes this even results in discovering that they despise your very identity. That is a bitter pill to swallow.

As much as this feels a bit like a curse, in reality it probably is a good thing. You’ve all heard the term ‘Seperating art from artist’, right? You’ve probably heard it bandied about every time someone brings up the troubled context of an artist’s life, as a means of mitigating some semblence of guilt for still wanting to engage with their work.

(Interestingly I’ve only really seen this knocking around when someone’s been outed as a bigot or sex pest. Whenever someone of note uses their platform to talk about progressive issues, it always seems to be a chorus of ‘stay out of politics and do your job’. Weird double standard, but not really the point of this post so i’ll leave it at that)

To wish for a seperation of art from artist is an understandable desire, but it is one that inherently does the very medium a disservice. People make things. They paint. They act. They sing and dance and play. To take thoughts unattainable and make them tangible is a magic that intrinsically requires that human touch.

If all you want is an enjoyment of the end result without having to think about the complexity of the lives that brought it into existence, then perhaps that much maligned, grotesque push towards AI generated art really does have an audience. I hope that’s not the case.

What makes a good song, or motion picture performance or work of literature is that it in some way reflects an aspect of lived experience, the authenticity of human life, from which we take both the good and the bad. Through this we have to contest with the fact that sometimes beautiful things are made by people with ugly souls.

It is then our responsibility as fellow human beings to put aside our personal feelings in order to condemn the actions and beliefs that we hold to be morally reprehensible.

We have long agreed that art without soul is little more than keys jangling before an infant. If we continue to believe this then we must make the decision to present our beliefs through action, no matter how much it may dismay us to do so.

Only you can hold yourself to your own standards. I appreciate that it’s much harder when communities are formed around a certain creator or group, but even then the onus is still on you to make sure those you care about know what matters to you.

As I write this I get ready to watch David Fincher’s latest film, starring Michael Fassbender, a man whose abuse accusations are well documented and have since managed to keep deathly quiet, and I know in doing so I am a hypocrite.

I have been a hypocrite before and will likely continue to do so for many years to come. There is media I still consume made by people I know to be rotten. For this I need to work on the promptness and immediacy of my response to new information, to more readily abandon all the things I know to be bad, and not just the ones I wasn’t all that fussed about in the first place.

Part of that process, something that helps ameliorate the dread of abandoning the stuff that has found its way into your heart, is to recognise and honor the work of those who go relatively unnoticed by the wider world; The countless artists who craft visions of beauty of equal standing with their more popular counterparts, but with the moral conviction to know how to behave themselves and not stand for fascist institutions.

Perhaps these things won’t quite have the polish and scope you are used to, and maybe you won’t necessarily be able to connect with it in the same way, but it is far more worthy a pursuit to challenge your notion of what art can be than to let yourself become stale.

There is a wealth of creativity available to engage with at your fingertips, much of it enthralling, emotionally nutritious and with a far lighter cost to the soul.

There’s far too much good stuff out there to waste your breath of the masterworks of abusers and bigots. Bury your idols. Broaden your horizons. Be mindful in how you engage with media and you will be rewarded with a far richer life for it.