Trust the Tale
There have been calls to boycott the film version of Orson Scott Card's 'Ender's Game' on the grounds that the author of the original book has expressed certain views over same-sex marriage.
I'm not endorsing his particular views at all but I can see big problems with viewing artists as pseudo public figures whose reported words have to pass any number of tests of prevailing social attitudes before their art is seen as somehow acceptable. Authors have opinions- some of which you might disagree with. Does that really invalidate their aristic expression?
Some people have problems with listening to Wagner, knowing the connections with Hitler but do the questionable views of poet Philip Larkin about women/race mean we should not read his poems? After his death, certain less savoury details emerged about Roald Dahl but many of us are still happy to allow our kids to enjoy his stories.
I can see the problem if the work itself exemplifies problematic/objectionable attitudes (DW Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation is a seminal work in film history but it clearly also glorifies the KKK).
I was just thinking about this moral minefield after the discovery of a huge 'collection' of Nazi-confiscated art in Munich. Hitler & Co. banned so-called degenerate art because it represented an ethnicity of which he disapproved but if he'd been allowed to prevail, works by Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee etc would all have been consigned to history.
Maybe we should hold to the words of DH Lawrence, let artists do their work and 'trust the tale, not the teller'.
I'm not endorsing his particular views at all but I can see big problems with viewing artists as pseudo public figures whose reported words have to pass any number of tests of prevailing social attitudes before their art is seen as somehow acceptable. Authors have opinions- some of which you might disagree with. Does that really invalidate their aristic expression?
Some people have problems with listening to Wagner, knowing the connections with Hitler but do the questionable views of poet Philip Larkin about women/race mean we should not read his poems? After his death, certain less savoury details emerged about Roald Dahl but many of us are still happy to allow our kids to enjoy his stories.
I can see the problem if the work itself exemplifies problematic/objectionable attitudes (DW Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation is a seminal work in film history but it clearly also glorifies the KKK).
I was just thinking about this moral minefield after the discovery of a huge 'collection' of Nazi-confiscated art in Munich. Hitler & Co. banned so-called degenerate art because it represented an ethnicity of which he disapproved but if he'd been allowed to prevail, works by Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee etc would all have been consigned to history.
Maybe we should hold to the words of DH Lawrence, let artists do their work and 'trust the tale, not the teller'.
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