How do I reconcile aesthetic pleasure with moral disgust? Which of my feelings will win? What do I do with art I love that was created by a monster?

One of the common answers to that question has been repeated so often it has come to seem as though it’s an ontologically self-evident truth: You must separate the artist from the art.

Separating the artist from the art, this argument goes, is the best way to approach all art, no matter what you are trying to get from it. And to fail to do so is both childish and gauche, because only philistines think it necessary to reconcile their feelings about a piece of art with their feelings about the people who created it.

But the idea of separating the artist from the art is not a self-evident truth. It is an academic idea that was extremely popular as a tool for analyzing poetry at the beginning of the 20th century, and that has since evolved in several different directions. It’s one possible way of thinking about art, but it’s not the only one.

To get a handle on what all the options out there look like, I interviewed three literary critics on the phone. I asked them to walk me through how the idea of separating the art from the artist emerged, how it’s changed over time, and what the alternatives are now. My hope was that by the end of our conversations, I’d have a better sense of how to solve my Edward Scissorhands problem — and how to deal with all the art created by men who have been accused of monstrous things over the past year of #MeToo. Here’s what I learned.

Read more at: What do we do when the art we love was created by a monster?