Current Events
Jan. 22nd, 2025 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreI’ll get back to the catch-up stuff soon, but there are a couple of newsy things I want to write about while they are still fresh.
Ceasefire: I was going to write a long treatise on this, but I think it is better to just say that I am skeptical of long-term success but trying to be cautiously optimistic.
Art versus the Artist: The scandal du jour is, of course, the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman. I do think that he has taken advantage of vulnerable young women. The question is whether or not he should be “cancelled.” And, for me, this comes down to the long-standing issue of what to do when bad people produce great art.
I first encountered Neil Gaiman in the early 1990’s when I had a long flight delay in Saint Louis and had reached the end of the book I had with me. So I stopped in at the airport bookstore and, in the course of searching for something tolerable to read on the plane, saw Good Omens, which was co-written by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Not being a reader of graphic novels (with a few exceptions, that tend to be on specifically Jewish themes), I’d never read the Sandman series, but I had read a few of Pratchett’s books and mostly liked them, though I found them uneven. At any rate, I bought that book and ended up enjoying it quite a bit. Sometime after that, I was in Portland, Oregon and browsing in Powell’s Books and one of the people who worked there recommended Neverwhere to me. It had a combination of real life and folkloric themes that I found inherently appealing and it remains one of my favorites of his work. I have read only a handful of his books and I saw him speak at DAR Constitution Hall a while back. I thought he was good-looking and spoke well. Floppy hair and British accent - I could see young women falling for him in the same way they might have a crush on Hugh Grant.
I obviously don’t know exactly what did and didn’t happen, though it seems clear that he doesn’t really understand power dynamics between people and he doesn’t understand the concept of consent. But what does this imply about his books? It may not be fair for me to comment since relatively few of them are the sort of thing that really appeals to me, but the more general question is what should happen to the work produced by bad people? To cut to the chase, I have no intention of throwing out those of his books that I own nor would I necessarily refuse to buy something he wrote if it fell into the types of books he wrote that I’ve liked in the past.
Let me take another example. In May 2001, I took a trip to Malta, where I saw Caravaggio’s painting Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. This is an astonishing painting, considered one of the 10 most important Western paintings of all time. I was blown away by the use of color as well as chiaroscuro. But Caravaggio himself was a sorry excuse for a human being. He had a number of problematic relationships (primarily with young boys), was arrested frequently for brawling, and even committed at least one murder. Nowadays, he would be a prime candidate for cancellation. But he was also the most brilliant painter of the 17th century.
Where I am going with this is I’ve seen the suggestion that it’s okay to tolerate the work of bad people who are dead for some length of time. But if we act quickly to get rid of the works of the living miscreants, how would we ever see the good art created by bad people? And I think the world is enhanced by good art no matter how bad a person the artist is.
Ceasefire: I was going to write a long treatise on this, but I think it is better to just say that I am skeptical of long-term success but trying to be cautiously optimistic.
Art versus the Artist: The scandal du jour is, of course, the sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman. I do think that he has taken advantage of vulnerable young women. The question is whether or not he should be “cancelled.” And, for me, this comes down to the long-standing issue of what to do when bad people produce great art.
I first encountered Neil Gaiman in the early 1990’s when I had a long flight delay in Saint Louis and had reached the end of the book I had with me. So I stopped in at the airport bookstore and, in the course of searching for something tolerable to read on the plane, saw Good Omens, which was co-written by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Not being a reader of graphic novels (with a few exceptions, that tend to be on specifically Jewish themes), I’d never read the Sandman series, but I had read a few of Pratchett’s books and mostly liked them, though I found them uneven. At any rate, I bought that book and ended up enjoying it quite a bit. Sometime after that, I was in Portland, Oregon and browsing in Powell’s Books and one of the people who worked there recommended Neverwhere to me. It had a combination of real life and folkloric themes that I found inherently appealing and it remains one of my favorites of his work. I have read only a handful of his books and I saw him speak at DAR Constitution Hall a while back. I thought he was good-looking and spoke well. Floppy hair and British accent - I could see young women falling for him in the same way they might have a crush on Hugh Grant.
I obviously don’t know exactly what did and didn’t happen, though it seems clear that he doesn’t really understand power dynamics between people and he doesn’t understand the concept of consent. But what does this imply about his books? It may not be fair for me to comment since relatively few of them are the sort of thing that really appeals to me, but the more general question is what should happen to the work produced by bad people? To cut to the chase, I have no intention of throwing out those of his books that I own nor would I necessarily refuse to buy something he wrote if it fell into the types of books he wrote that I’ve liked in the past.
Let me take another example. In May 2001, I took a trip to Malta, where I saw Caravaggio’s painting Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. This is an astonishing painting, considered one of the 10 most important Western paintings of all time. I was blown away by the use of color as well as chiaroscuro. But Caravaggio himself was a sorry excuse for a human being. He had a number of problematic relationships (primarily with young boys), was arrested frequently for brawling, and even committed at least one murder. Nowadays, he would be a prime candidate for cancellation. But he was also the most brilliant painter of the 17th century.
Where I am going with this is I’ve seen the suggestion that it’s okay to tolerate the work of bad people who are dead for some length of time. But if we act quickly to get rid of the works of the living miscreants, how would we ever see the good art created by bad people? And I think the world is enhanced by good art no matter how bad a person the artist is.
Neil Gaiman cancel
Date: 2025-01-25 02:16 am (UTC)