GardenoftheDead wrote:art and artist are inseparable.
see, i completely disagree with this. i think that if the art and the artist are inseparable, what you've got there is crappy art; good art should be able to stand independent of the artist's personality. to me, if a work of art has any meaning at all, it has meaning because of the relationship between the work and the person who interacts with the work. eventually the artist, and his context, is gone; Rembrandt and Beethoven speak to us because the common humanity of their work reaches out to us across the centuries independent of Rembrandt's bankruptcies and scandals and Beethoven's triumphs and tragedies. and Andy Warhol was the object of a media cult, but his ideas still stand though his image is now largely forgotten. besides, how large of a playlist are you going to come up with of morally correct artistes, and doesn't that smack just a bit of Tipper Gore and Mary Whitehouse?
no, sorry that Warhol bit is utter bullshit. his image IS his art, and is completely intrinsic to it. and it'd be fairly easy making a list of great musicians who weren't terrible people. moreover there are plenty of utterly brilliant artists whose art is inseparable from each other. Kerouac, Bill Evans, Ana Mendieta, Allan Kaprow, Steve Reich, Saul Williams, Emily Dickenson, etc.
you only overlook terrible things people do when you want to be apologist for the good they've done, or believe their good outweighs the bad; a stance that is often heavily biased.
Emily Dickenson's poetry sucks whether you know she was a sickly shut-in or not.
And Warhol's image doesn't really convey the meaning of the Marilyns nearly as well as The Factory does.
