Tainted Love

Will Baude asks whether art is "tainted" by an artist's moral decisions unrelated to the piece of artwork. Probably someone with a more formal education in normative ethics—a more ethical person than moi, if you will—could cite and source the appropriate prosecutions and defenses of history's notorious artists. Will wonders about Adolph Hitler's art:

But the aesthetic/philosophical question is, should museums refuse to show his work (if it is good) since it was created by one of the most evil men in history? Or, contrariwise, should they agree to show his work (even if it is bad) since it might provide data about the mind behind the madness? What should art museums do? What should history museums do?

Argument's over once you cite Hitler!

I actually don't think Will's example of Hitler is a great one, though, given the question—any historical museum would be stupid not to display Hitler's paintings. How fascinating would that be? But I can't think of a good reason why an art museum should. Even if his art did something unprecedented by the 20th century canon, which is a considerable if, his work would be too distracting for any reasonable curator to want to include. Hitler's paintings definitely belong in a museum, but not a show.

Hitler, of course, committed crimes against humanity, the sort that would seem to obviate the question as to whether he has any constructive observations to offer in the way of art. What about crimes against individuals? Still, I think that waging an artist's work against a larger consideration of the artist's set of morals is a slippery slope—not exactly persons of the cloth, the lot of artists whom we generally consider noteworthy. You shouldn't have to approve vehicular homicide (or adultery, or alcoholism, or smoking, or cursing) to like Jackson Pollock; enjoying a Carl Andre installation signals that you have fundamentally decided that he did not kill his wife, Ana Mendieta (which is something of a mystery).

You're probably best off if you take the line from Barthes's "The Death of the Author"—then your quibbles with the artist's moral fiber have no more bearing upon your enjoyment of the art than your opinion of the bankteller's hair-do affects the value of the money he hands you. As Barthes says:

The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.

It's certainly a lot easier to address even Hitler's art if you're not asking What does the author want to say to me? but instead What information do I want to know?—in other words, discounting any theological cohesive Author in Adolph Hitler whom you're expected to accept or reject. You're the Reader, you're the principal actor in all this, etc.

That's the aesthetic gymnastics, but it's all a great deal more simple to me. It's a question principally over what you want out of an artwork. You can watch Roman Polanski—you ought to watch The Piano—and you should not let him near the women you care about.

UPDATE: Hitler the painter was in the news today. It turns out that his paintings (some of them, anyway) have been archived in government storage in Alexandria, Virginia, by U.S. military fiat. Who knew? You can probably find them next to the Ark of the Covenant.

Posted by Kriston at November 29, 2004 11:15 PM