A familiar beat can sometimes get you moving before you realize what song you’re moving to. Recently, I found myself bobbing my head to something playing over a store’s speakers, not able to place the song at first. Then the melody and lyrics began.
“It’s close to midnight and something evil’s lurking in the dark,” an unmistakable tenor voice sang.
How did I not recognize Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”? Every person born since the 1980s grew up hearing that song on a loop around Halloween. I loved the music video as a kid; it’s a part of American culture.
But on this day, in 2019, I stopped bobbing my head with an icky realization. I had made a decision not to seek out Michael Jackson’s music after watching the documentary“Leaving Neverland,”released on HBO in January, where I learned the harrowing details of Jackson’s alleged sexual abuse of Wade Robson and James Safechuck.这部电影带来了多年的指控杰克son into such clear focus that any lingering fondness I had for his music was mostly replaced by a mix of negative emotions when I thought about the artist. Enjoying Jackson’s music now feels like I’m denying the victims’ experiences or condoning his alleged abuses. I certainly didn’t want to financially support his estate with purchases or streams of songs.
Yet, there I was, still physically moving to his hit like it was 1983. It’s complicated.
A few weeks later, “Shakespeare in Love” was playing on cable and I settled in to watch one of my teenage favorites. Then the producing credit for Harvey Weinstein flashed on the screen.
If the name is familiar, it’s becauseWeinstein’s alleged pattern of unwanted sexual behavior toward women was one of the factors that sparked the#MeToo movement. This includes allegations of attempted sexual coercion by well-known actors like Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan, as well as claims by less well-known women.
But my desire not to support Weinstein also felt weirdly like I was punishing Gwyneth Paltrow, Dame Judi Dench and all the other talented, non-sexually abusive people who worked on the film. It was an unexpected side effect.
I flipped to another channel that was playing Woody Allen’s “Radio Days,” a movie I hadn’t seen in years because of allegations of sexual abuse against the filmmaker dating back to the early 1990s. Again, I turned off the TV.
It’s unfortunate that some of Mia Farrow’s best work was for Allen, her former partner who has been accused of sexually abusing their daughter,Dylan Farrow, and for director Roman Polanski, who isa fugitive from justice because of a statutory rape case against him in the U.S. But should we be denied Mia Farrow’s performances because the directors she worked with turned out to be possibly bad men? It’s complicated.
The list of artists I currently have a complicated audience relationship with because of well-substantiated allegations of abusive behavior is longer than this column will allow. Some of these artists are already dead and unavailable for further response, like Jackson. Others are still here and, until recently, were still creating work. What we do with living artists who have been proved to be abusive or otherwise problematic is clear: If the case against them is definitive, we do not enable them to be in continued positions of power or access where their abuses can go unchecked. But what do we do with the art they’ve already created that exists in the world?
I repeat, it’s really, really complicated.
We certainly don’t want to put money in the pockets of people who act in dangerous ways or espouse beliefs that are reprehensible to us, but I don’t know what our obligations are in regard to the existing art created by them. We stand to lose a lot of art from the canon, including work by composer Richard Wagner (an anti-Semite), sculptor Carl Andre (who is blamed by many forthe death of his wife, Ana Mendieta) and the entire Hollywood studio system (which was exploitative on many levels until its demise in the 1960s).
I’m a believer in adding context to the audience experience, so maybe that’s part of the solution to processing art by problematic artists that already exists in the culture. Imagine a world where every museum label has an asterisk listing the alleged misdeeds of an artist or where DJs announce allegations against recording artists before spinning each song. It seems extreme, but maybe that’s one of the steps we’ll eventually have to take in this reckoning.
I don’t have the answers to how we deal with this work. As old idols fall with the systems that enabled them, we will have to continue to ask ourselves tough questions. For me, knowing that a living artist has hurt people is a clear line that curtails my enjoyment. Being a conscious, informed consumer of our culture isn’t just an option, it’s an obligation.
But sometimes, there are pieces of our culture made by these artists that are so ingrained in our lives, like a certain song at Halloween, that it’s hard to fully let go.