Freshly Reprehensible
July 26, 2018 4:49 AM Subscribe
“How do we negotiate the fact that we have a brilliant author who did some despicable things?” he told me. “And how do we make sure that while studying his work, we don’t inadvertently give the impression that the behaviors are somehow okay?” The question is thornier with Wallace than it would be for most of his contemporaries. Academics explain David Foster Wallace to me by Daniel Kolitz
As mentioned: Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo by Clare Hayes-Brady
As mentioned: Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo by Clare Hayes-Brady
This made my eyebrows throb:
But then this quote from NPR's Colleen Leahy saved me.
Anyway, neat articles. Thanks, chavenet.
posted by rokusan at 5:51 AM on July 26, 2018 [34 favorites]
"Does reading Wallace make me a bad feminist?"Because, to me, the day that the solution to anything is not-reading something is a dark, dark day for feminism, and enlightenment in general.
But then this quote from NPR's Colleen Leahy saved me.
“You can say fuck this culture, this is not for me, it never has been for me, I’m gonna read Maggie Nelson, I’m gonna read Jesmyn Ward, I’m gonna read Jeanette Winterson, I’m gonna read fucking Adrienne Rich, I’m gonna read Toni Morrison. Fuck those guys, I don’t need them.So my little rollercoaster ride ended with hope, anyway. You gotta read it all, and discuss it all, and not fight your fights with blinders on.
Or you can say: I’m gonna read all those amazing women, and also I’m gonna read Wallace and tell you why you’re wrong, and also admit where I was wrong. And I don’t think there’s a right approach.”
Anyway, neat articles. Thanks, chavenet.
posted by rokusan at 5:51 AM on July 26, 2018 [34 favorites]
Except it's not possible to read it all, so at the end of the day, you do have to make a choice of where to spend your time.
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:53 AM on July 26, 2018 [69 favorites]
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:53 AM on July 26, 2018 [69 favorites]
There’s a time honored tradition of edgy or groundbreaking female writing being relegated to a few scholars. I think saying you can read Wallace and everyone else is a way of fooling yourself. Who is being forgotten while you continue to read Wallace?
posted by steady-state strawberry at 5:56 AM on July 26, 2018 [58 favorites]
posted by steady-state strawberry at 5:56 AM on July 26, 2018 [58 favorites]
Hayes-Brady’s talk gave us exactly what we wanted; perhaps what many of us came to Normal to find: a cogent and nuanced permission structure within which to a) continue reading Wallace (none of us were ever going to stop doing this, anyway) and b) justify our continued reading to others — others who, like anyone with a political conviction in 2018, are fundamentally unpersuadable, and who either way wouldn’t take well to being accused of neoliberalist sympathies.
I think there's a lot of great reasons to read a misogynist, including the simple fact that his books give you pleasure. A true commitment to intellectualism and humanity, though, would mean being honest with yourself about your reasoning and the costs. The author of this article seems to be doing that, as shown in the quote above, but not all the other conference goers seem to be.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:02 AM on July 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
I think there's a lot of great reasons to read a misogynist, including the simple fact that his books give you pleasure. A true commitment to intellectualism and humanity, though, would mean being honest with yourself about your reasoning and the costs. The author of this article seems to be doing that, as shown in the quote above, but not all the other conference goers seem to be.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:02 AM on July 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
Worth linking one of the essays mentioned in the piece: Men Reccommend David Foster Wallace To Me. It’s an excellent essay. She also reads Brief Interviews With Hideous Men for the piece and her (positive) comments about his story The Depressed Person are right on. As a person with depression, I gotta say: it is the “best” (eg most: horrifying, accurate, uncomfortable, desperate, sad) cultural product about depression I have ever encountered. That said, man does Dierdre Coyle nail the exact feeling a (this) lady gets when told by many dudes to read DWF.
posted by Kemma80 at 6:05 AM on July 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by Kemma80 at 6:05 AM on July 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
Hm.
If someone is going to be deeply embedded in professional DFW fandom, yes: this is how I'd like it to be done. Absolutely.
At the same time, I don't think this is really a counterargument to the irritated complaints and stereotyped stories like Men Recommend. These folks are highly invested fans of the man's writing: academics studying him, or fans willing to pay to attend professional conferences in his honor, particularly the conference mentioned here with it's history of a very specific, honest look at Wallace's legacy.
(What is a legacy?)
I suspect the people who are fans enough to be constantly recommending Wallace's work but not invested enough in feminism, etc to have honestly grappled with that are also not the people attending this conference.
If the purpose of academic studies of a given author is to contextualize his work and evaluate it in a greater context, then, I wonder how it is that you change the default presentation of the work without the commentary on the man's misogyny. Do you encourage publishers to add that commentary to annotated versions or even general use versions of the works? Do you try to reach out to everyone using the works to make a general point about the canon of modern literature? (It's a genre that personally gives me hives, but we enforce exposure to it through the medium of the public schools, which gives it a certain weightiness not afforded to other writing genres.)
How do you, the people who love this work so much that you are willing to put in the time and effort to contextualize it and discuss the difficulties with it alongside the strength, handle the weighty responsibility of trickle-down contextualizing it to English professors who are not scholars specifically of this work? To English teachers? To casual readers?
How do you create a hegemony of context? That, I think, is the knock-on price of problematic art and disseminating your problematic faves. I have problematic faves for whom this is worth it for me (I love Terry Pratchett and often do rec him, but goddamn is Interesting Times racist) and problematic faves for whom this is not worth it for me to recommend frequently.
How does that enter into this conversation?
posted by sciatrix at 6:09 AM on July 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
If someone is going to be deeply embedded in professional DFW fandom, yes: this is how I'd like it to be done. Absolutely.
At the same time, I don't think this is really a counterargument to the irritated complaints and stereotyped stories like Men Recommend. These folks are highly invested fans of the man's writing: academics studying him, or fans willing to pay to attend professional conferences in his honor, particularly the conference mentioned here with it's history of a very specific, honest look at Wallace's legacy.
(What is a legacy?)
I suspect the people who are fans enough to be constantly recommending Wallace's work but not invested enough in feminism, etc to have honestly grappled with that are also not the people attending this conference.
If the purpose of academic studies of a given author is to contextualize his work and evaluate it in a greater context, then, I wonder how it is that you change the default presentation of the work without the commentary on the man's misogyny. Do you encourage publishers to add that commentary to annotated versions or even general use versions of the works? Do you try to reach out to everyone using the works to make a general point about the canon of modern literature? (It's a genre that personally gives me hives, but we enforce exposure to it through the medium of the public schools, which gives it a certain weightiness not afforded to other writing genres.)
How do you, the people who love this work so much that you are willing to put in the time and effort to contextualize it and discuss the difficulties with it alongside the strength, handle the weighty responsibility of trickle-down contextualizing it to English professors who are not scholars specifically of this work? To English teachers? To casual readers?
How do you create a hegemony of context? That, I think, is the knock-on price of problematic art and disseminating your problematic faves. I have problematic faves for whom this is worth it for me (I love Terry Pratchett and often do rec him, but goddamn is Interesting Times racist) and problematic faves for whom this is not worth it for me to recommend frequently.
How does that enter into this conversation?
posted by sciatrix at 6:09 AM on July 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
Because, to me, the day that the solution to anything is not-reading something is a dark, dark day for feminism, and enlightenment in general.
lol no. As stated, the canon is already too large; math alone dictates that you make choices and reckon with the opportunity cost.
And also, you know what? I already have to spend all of my external life soaking in this poison. Fuck right off if you think I’m obligated to let it into my internal life too for the sake of “enlightenment,” and double fuck off if you think it’s for the sake of “feminism.”
posted by schadenfrau at 6:31 AM on July 26, 2018 [61 favorites]
lol no. As stated, the canon is already too large; math alone dictates that you make choices and reckon with the opportunity cost.
And also, you know what? I already have to spend all of my external life soaking in this poison. Fuck right off if you think I’m obligated to let it into my internal life too for the sake of “enlightenment,” and double fuck off if you think it’s for the sake of “feminism.”
posted by schadenfrau at 6:31 AM on July 26, 2018 [61 favorites]
(“Honestly I don’t really know what happened,” Metcalf told me, over make-your-own-tacos at lunch. “He defined the word ‘ouroboros’ over and over, and then he talked about programming for a while, and then he defined ouroboros a couple more times, and then it was over.”)
I have been to this talk. Often.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:33 AM on July 26, 2018 [35 favorites]
I have been to this talk. Often.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:33 AM on July 26, 2018 [35 favorites]
What is a legacy?
It's planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. Some notes I wrote at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.
Sorry, wrong MeFifandom cult.
posted by rokusan at 6:34 AM on July 26, 2018 [12 favorites]
It's planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. Some notes I wrote at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.
Sorry, wrong MeFi
posted by rokusan at 6:34 AM on July 26, 2018 [12 favorites]
Sounds like every lunch meeting in the Valley, Genji. And Redmond, for that matter.
posted by rokusan at 6:39 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by rokusan at 6:39 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by sciatrix at 6:39 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
I used to be sad that I didn't have anyone with whom to discuss IJ after I read it. Now I count that as a blessing.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:44 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:44 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
Also, it’s incredible to me that this is like...a question. The answer is the same in every instance of revealed predation and abuse: he’s done. He got to where he was at least partially by abusing people, by making sure those with less privilege than him weren’t heard. Now it’s time to hear them. He had his time in the limelight, because he fucking stole it from women or POC or others he could abuse and exploit without consequence. He’s done.
If you need a genius to build up and analyze and hold conferences about, please feel free to go looking for the work of the many, many marginalized people that he helped marginalize further. It’s not like there’s some shortage of lady genius, or black genius, or or or.
Throwing up your hands like “oh no, but the work is so important,” as though there isn’t an entire goddamn continent of unexplored genius where you could actually make a name for yourself, is fucking weird and I find it suspect.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:04 AM on July 26, 2018 [46 favorites]
If you need a genius to build up and analyze and hold conferences about, please feel free to go looking for the work of the many, many marginalized people that he helped marginalize further. It’s not like there’s some shortage of lady genius, or black genius, or or or.
Throwing up your hands like “oh no, but the work is so important,” as though there isn’t an entire goddamn continent of unexplored genius where you could actually make a name for yourself, is fucking weird and I find it suspect.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:04 AM on July 26, 2018 [46 favorites]
I hadn't heard any noise about him silencing other authors or stealing material. What are you referencing?
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:12 AM on July 26, 2018
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:12 AM on July 26, 2018
“I volunteered on this panel partly so that we could have a panel. But I felt like part of the problem was having a diversity panel with two white dudes on it, and I didn’t want that to happen. So I asked Wendy to replace me.”
Formerly MeFi's own!
I took a class with DFW in the 80's and I've mentioned it before. He was nice to me. He slept with one of the other students in the class at some point, maybe after the class was over, maybe not. He was always someone like Pynchon or Keysey for me, someone who was important for a time and then I outgrew. And whose books men were always trying to push into my hands. Thanks for this post.
posted by jessamyn at 7:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [32 favorites]
Formerly MeFi's own!
I took a class with DFW in the 80's and I've mentioned it before. He was nice to me. He slept with one of the other students in the class at some point, maybe after the class was over, maybe not. He was always someone like Pynchon or Keysey for me, someone who was important for a time and then I outgrew. And whose books men were always trying to push into my hands. Thanks for this post.
posted by jessamyn at 7:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [32 favorites]
*makes faces* Man, if we could make people give up their favorites and their career topics like that because we find that a dude is a hideous misogynist with deeply fucked up sexual choices and behaviors, we would probably have a lot less trouble actually getting people to give enough of a shit to enforce consequences for his behavior.
I mean, I hope the wake of #metoo is that in the future men who harm women (and other men) like that will be thrown out on their ear or otherwise punished sharply enough to actually change their behavior before they are so Deeply Beloved By All that you're having to argue to people that Their Faves are shitty and they should, IDK, feel bad for liking the work? change career focuses? keep their appreciation to themselves? But that's not the situation we're finding ourselves in today. And in many ways #metoo is walking this really hard line by trying to bring down people who have not faced consequences and whose art folks have gotten really attached to despite increasing horror behind the scenes because those consequences have been absent.... despite the protection and guiltiness of those folk who love the art and extend that love to the author.
I find that it is easier to get people to understand why other people are saying "my notion of that guy is Too Poisoned by his other behaviors to be able to engage with his art with anything but repulsion" and, more importantly, listen to that boundary if you don't trigger their guilt for being able to divorce the two and take something useful or beautiful away from it. (This can be hard depending how oversensitive folks are about this thing, mind you, but leaning harder on the guilt button does not seem likely to help it.)
David Foster Wallace is an easy target here because Metafilter hates him, and frankly I've never read him and never much wanted to, so I can't really speak for the man's work myself. That's literally why I brought up Pratchett in an effort to remind folks that your cows ain't sacred either; that all media is problematic; that there is nothing you love that hasn't been touched by racism or sexism or some other terrible prejudice. If you draw that hard line in the sand -- no one can celebrate this work because of this aspect of the author -- then you wind up with people arguing about whether the work or the author or the director etc is really a shithead or whether the problematic shit really counts because people who hold works close to their heart don't want to give them up. And that impulse is stronger the closer you hold something to your heart, too.
*hands in the air* I don't give a shit about Wallace. But I care about tactics, and that's what fascinates me about this piece: it's this beautiful microcosm of everything that is truly, deeply hard about #metoo and people who are trying to grapple with it as ethically as they can. I want to know if what they're trying has any chance of working, or if they're tackling the wrong problem entirely and just creating a protected pocket for uncritical admiration of Wallace to flourish.
posted by sciatrix at 7:43 AM on July 26, 2018 [39 favorites]
I mean, I hope the wake of #metoo is that in the future men who harm women (and other men) like that will be thrown out on their ear or otherwise punished sharply enough to actually change their behavior before they are so Deeply Beloved By All that you're having to argue to people that Their Faves are shitty and they should, IDK, feel bad for liking the work? change career focuses? keep their appreciation to themselves? But that's not the situation we're finding ourselves in today. And in many ways #metoo is walking this really hard line by trying to bring down people who have not faced consequences and whose art folks have gotten really attached to despite increasing horror behind the scenes because those consequences have been absent.... despite the protection and guiltiness of those folk who love the art and extend that love to the author.
I find that it is easier to get people to understand why other people are saying "my notion of that guy is Too Poisoned by his other behaviors to be able to engage with his art with anything but repulsion" and, more importantly, listen to that boundary if you don't trigger their guilt for being able to divorce the two and take something useful or beautiful away from it. (This can be hard depending how oversensitive folks are about this thing, mind you, but leaning harder on the guilt button does not seem likely to help it.)
David Foster Wallace is an easy target here because Metafilter hates him, and frankly I've never read him and never much wanted to, so I can't really speak for the man's work myself. That's literally why I brought up Pratchett in an effort to remind folks that your cows ain't sacred either; that all media is problematic; that there is nothing you love that hasn't been touched by racism or sexism or some other terrible prejudice. If you draw that hard line in the sand -- no one can celebrate this work because of this aspect of the author -- then you wind up with people arguing about whether the work or the author or the director etc is really a shithead or whether the problematic shit really counts because people who hold works close to their heart don't want to give them up. And that impulse is stronger the closer you hold something to your heart, too.
*hands in the air* I don't give a shit about Wallace. But I care about tactics, and that's what fascinates me about this piece: it's this beautiful microcosm of everything that is truly, deeply hard about #metoo and people who are trying to grapple with it as ethically as they can. I want to know if what they're trying has any chance of working, or if they're tackling the wrong problem entirely and just creating a protected pocket for uncritical admiration of Wallace to flourish.
posted by sciatrix at 7:43 AM on July 26, 2018 [39 favorites]
And, to be clear, I'm not so much arguing Pratchett is Equally Problematic as trying to bring in a thought experiment: what if it's the art that you hold close to your chest that is created by a monster? How do you go forward and negotiate that if you're not so repulsed, because the monstrosity hasn't been aimed at you or your groups or because there are migitating factors (there always are) or because you are simply so attached to the work?
How do you go forward with that? Is there any ethical way to show work that you hold close to your heart to other people? Do you deliberately kill the transmission of appreciation for the art? Do you aggressively contextualize it and hedge it through with warnings so that no one can pick it up without knowing? Do you keep it secret and treat it as shameful? What do you do?
What does anyone do?
posted by sciatrix at 7:48 AM on July 26, 2018 [16 favorites]
How do you go forward with that? Is there any ethical way to show work that you hold close to your heart to other people? Do you deliberately kill the transmission of appreciation for the art? Do you aggressively contextualize it and hedge it through with warnings so that no one can pick it up without knowing? Do you keep it secret and treat it as shameful? What do you do?
What does anyone do?
posted by sciatrix at 7:48 AM on July 26, 2018 [16 favorites]
I'm not not reading David Foster Wallace. I'm just not reading him.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 7:53 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by lefty lucky cat at 7:53 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
I hadn't heard any noise about him silencing other authors or stealing material. What are you referencing?
Is this deliberately obtuse? I referenced stolen time in the limelight, and if you are a human in the world that has interacted with other humans in the world, it should be clear to you that there are myriad ways to do this, but some of the most effective would be: using your privilege — the fact that people seem to take you seriously, no matter what you have to say — to threaten the careers of people who speak out against your behavior, or to have them blackballed from conferences and communities and the sorts of networks where you get opportunities for advancement. Literally physically threatening people. Stalking them. Assaulting them. Conducting a years long terror campaign against them that the rest of your professional community just shrugs off. Spreading weird unverifiable rumors about how “crazy” or “difficult to work with” they are.
All of which have been done by at least one of the people in discussion in the FPP links, but also are just kind of...par for the course.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:06 AM on July 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
Is this deliberately obtuse? I referenced stolen time in the limelight, and if you are a human in the world that has interacted with other humans in the world, it should be clear to you that there are myriad ways to do this, but some of the most effective would be: using your privilege — the fact that people seem to take you seriously, no matter what you have to say — to threaten the careers of people who speak out against your behavior, or to have them blackballed from conferences and communities and the sorts of networks where you get opportunities for advancement. Literally physically threatening people. Stalking them. Assaulting them. Conducting a years long terror campaign against them that the rest of your professional community just shrugs off. Spreading weird unverifiable rumors about how “crazy” or “difficult to work with” they are.
All of which have been done by at least one of the people in discussion in the FPP links, but also are just kind of...par for the course.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:06 AM on July 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
I love Terry Pratchett and often do rec him, but goddamn is Interesting Times racist
Oh lord yes. And his earlier books were uh not necessarily awesome about women. One of the reasons I find Pratchett kind of interesting to this discussion is that, because he kept writing in the same world and in the same style while trying to tackle different kinds of stories for 40ish years, you can see him actively grapple with his own evolving understanding of the world. So like...I don’t think he was always super successful, but there’s a certain intimacy in watching an old, rich white man try to be better.
But also he never fucking stalked anyone, so.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:17 AM on July 26, 2018 [21 favorites]
Oh lord yes. And his earlier books were uh not necessarily awesome about women. One of the reasons I find Pratchett kind of interesting to this discussion is that, because he kept writing in the same world and in the same style while trying to tackle different kinds of stories for 40ish years, you can see him actively grapple with his own evolving understanding of the world. So like...I don’t think he was always super successful, but there’s a certain intimacy in watching an old, rich white man try to be better.
But also he never fucking stalked anyone, so.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:17 AM on July 26, 2018 [21 favorites]
Sorry, not deliberately, no. I really was that obtuse re: "stealing."
And upon reflection my thought process of "he may have stalked and abused and threatened and contemplated murdering Mary Karr but there's no evidence that he blackballed people at conferences, come on now" is clearly in need of, uh, lots of unpacking.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:29 AM on July 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
And upon reflection my thought process of "he may have stalked and abused and threatened and contemplated murdering Mary Karr but there's no evidence that he blackballed people at conferences, come on now" is clearly in need of, uh, lots of unpacking.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:29 AM on July 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
Yup, thank you for owning up in the thread. People don’t usually do that.
If I won the lottery tomorrow I would endow something somewhere with the express purpose of replacing the goddamn canon. Go find those forgotten and undiscovered geniuses, bright young things. Grapple with the fact that most of you only know what’s “good” because you have been told so, and go define a new era. You are welcome on my lawn for those purposes.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:43 AM on July 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
If I won the lottery tomorrow I would endow something somewhere with the express purpose of replacing the goddamn canon. Go find those forgotten and undiscovered geniuses, bright young things. Grapple with the fact that most of you only know what’s “good” because you have been told so, and go define a new era. You are welcome on my lawn for those purposes.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:43 AM on July 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
(IIRC, DFW was somewhere north of 6 feet and had trained to be a professional athlete. He could have hurled your 100 lb coffee table, too.)
posted by schadenfrau at 8:44 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by schadenfrau at 8:44 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
I'm not not reading David Foster Wallace. I'm just not reading him.
me, too, but that's a call I made for aesthetic and time allotment reasons long before I was aware of anything problematic about his character/actions.
you do have to make a choice of where to spend your time.
as long as I get to make the choice, I figure I'm living in the right culture. But part of playing fair in that culture is allowing myself to be informed, to not shy away from nasty sh** that is coming to light about my heroes, role models etc ...
what if it's the art that you hold close to your chest that is created by a monster?
art is often the best thing we get from a person -- whatever demons they're accommodating, they somehow keep them out of the art, or they find a way to turn the sinister into something somehow beautiful, astonishing, breathtaking. To be definitively closed to it is, for me, as problematic as refusing to acknowledge that one's hero is harboring monsters.
posted by philip-random at 9:08 AM on July 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
I had two white professors have us read so much DFW. I thought he was an okay writer. His prose was nice for that lobster boat article, but I don't want to be in his headspace for too long. I found being an English major as a queer woman of color to be difficult, because I spent a lot of time reading a lot of people's headspaces that I didn't really like or respect, by professors whose headspaces I also didn't like or respect. For a study of interiority and narrative, it makes sense that people's biases and axis of privilege and oppression also dictates the content they read.
I'm sure both of those professors would have hated to read any of the feminist of color stuff I was really into. I also read a lot of white men authors I like quite well (i.e. Victor Hugo, Phillip Pullman.) I have no shortage of white men creatives that I do like their work. But if one MUST study problematic men, they need to have the context of their lives framed and a more nuanced discussion of their writing that isn't in a vacuum.
posted by yueliang at 9:10 AM on July 26, 2018 [32 favorites]
I'm sure both of those professors would have hated to read any of the feminist of color stuff I was really into. I also read a lot of white men authors I like quite well (i.e. Victor Hugo, Phillip Pullman.) I have no shortage of white men creatives that I do like their work. But if one MUST study problematic men, they need to have the context of their lives framed and a more nuanced discussion of their writing that isn't in a vacuum.
posted by yueliang at 9:10 AM on July 26, 2018 [32 favorites]
Also, I will say this - I do think reading the canon is important. I am privileged as an English major to have a lot of time to read stuff that I don't necessarily like or respect but I can still talk or argue about it, because it's important to sometimes read stuff we don't like if we want to take it seriously as a discipline, because it at least informs and deepens our perspectives on what and why we do prefer and can argue for the importance of other things.
But we also need to have an intersectional feminist and cultural studies critique of who determines what the canon is, what the power dynamics are in it, and which canons are we following or deciding. If so much energy is spent on DFW, that must be justified beyond a simple "his prose was so great!" many people's prose are so great, but why in particular is THIS prose so great? Why on earth are we studying him versus another author? And you can't say just because the prose is so great or what his topics were about, every writer has topics they write about, that's the definition of a writer.
And that weighs into the tricky thing of "so how good do marginalized people have to be, to be better than the canon? to be taken seriously at that same level? what pressures do they have to undergo? and, what is 'good' about their work through which particular lens?"
posted by yueliang at 9:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [14 favorites]
But we also need to have an intersectional feminist and cultural studies critique of who determines what the canon is, what the power dynamics are in it, and which canons are we following or deciding. If so much energy is spent on DFW, that must be justified beyond a simple "his prose was so great!" many people's prose are so great, but why in particular is THIS prose so great? Why on earth are we studying him versus another author? And you can't say just because the prose is so great or what his topics were about, every writer has topics they write about, that's the definition of a writer.
And that weighs into the tricky thing of "so how good do marginalized people have to be, to be better than the canon? to be taken seriously at that same level? what pressures do they have to undergo? and, what is 'good' about their work through which particular lens?"
posted by yueliang at 9:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [14 favorites]
Great artistic works can get even more interesting once you know the artist's character was in some way gravely deficient ... which I guess is another way of saying hypocrisy can be more insightful than sincerity.
posted by MattD at 9:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by MattD at 9:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
And also, you know what? I already have to spend all of my external life soaking in this poison. Fuck right off if you think I’m obligated to let it into my internal life too for the sake of “enlightenment,” and double fuck off if you think it’s for the sake of “feminism.”
I have been straight up ruminating on the word poisoned for the past couple weeks in exactly this same context.
I loved DFW. I have had relationships with men who reminded me of him. I wanted to be loved by the type of man DFW seemed to be. I "engaged" the culture, the men, the art. I read the books the fanboy men told me were good and loved the books and the boys.
I have been on a casually enforced media diet of metafilter, a metafilterer's tumblr, and women authors for a few years now. At some point it stopped feeling like a diet and more like an antidote, and now an oasis. I think my time spent with Great Male Literature did me like... fractal damage.
posted by skrozidile at 9:17 AM on July 26, 2018 [29 favorites]
I think too there's a more general silencing that comes when men in positions of power repeatedly screw women who look up to them or admire them, instead of mentoring those women or just leaving those women alone, and often these men leave these women worse off in their wake, whereas they don't necessarily destroy/hobble/disrupt their young male admirers in the same way.
I'm thinking here of some women I know in academia whose advisors were predators in this way, and how those women were terribly destabilized by the experience and none of those women persisted in academia. The man in question didn't have to actively blacklist them - he just created a situation where the women couldn't stand to continue.
In past years Baez — who’s been to every conference — had tweeted his annoyance with the conference’s wall-to-wall whiteness, and he was ready to do same this year, especially when he learned that the post-keynote “Diversity Panel: The Wallace Studies Community in 2018” he was asked to moderate was to be composed of a white woman and two white guys.
So very 2018.
posted by Squeak Attack at 9:29 AM on July 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
I'm thinking here of some women I know in academia whose advisors were predators in this way, and how those women were terribly destabilized by the experience and none of those women persisted in academia. The man in question didn't have to actively blacklist them - he just created a situation where the women couldn't stand to continue.
In past years Baez — who’s been to every conference — had tweeted his annoyance with the conference’s wall-to-wall whiteness, and he was ready to do same this year, especially when he learned that the post-keynote “Diversity Panel: The Wallace Studies Community in 2018” he was asked to moderate was to be composed of a white woman and two white guys.
So very 2018.
posted by Squeak Attack at 9:29 AM on July 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
the canon is already too large; math alone dictates that you make choices and reckon with the opportunity cost.
Solution: read nothing but apocryphal fiction.
posted by jb at 10:08 AM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
Solution: read nothing but apocryphal fiction.
posted by jb at 10:08 AM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
I'm such a fan of Hannah Gadsby's take on separating art from the artist. Bullshit, she says. How much is a Picasso worth if you wiped his name off the canvas? You think these artists would ever let their art be separated from themselves?!
These abusive, misogynistic, shitty famous men are not the exception, they are the rule. And they control our stories! "Hindsight is a gift. Stop wasting my time."
posted by MiraK at 10:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [29 favorites]
These abusive, misogynistic, shitty famous men are not the exception, they are the rule. And they control our stories! "Hindsight is a gift. Stop wasting my time."
posted by MiraK at 10:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [29 favorites]
More seriously: an author/artist is not their work. If you don't want to consume things by a living artist because you don't want to give them money, that's fine. If you can't read certain things without reading the creator behind them, totally understandable. But sometimes you will still love things created by problematic people, and it's okay to love that thing, too. "Flight of the Valkyries" is still an awesome piece of music, by a terrible person.
There are many things I love that were created by people who were and are racist, sexist, abusive, and generally terrible. But the thing they created may have still given me joy or comfort or much needed catharsis. Sometimes their behaviour and the way it coincides with the specific work may taint the work; sometimes the two aren't closely connected for me (like Asimov - totally sexually assault-ish, but doesn't really connect with my appreciation of his thoughts on robots).
posted by jb at 10:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
There are many things I love that were created by people who were and are racist, sexist, abusive, and generally terrible. But the thing they created may have still given me joy or comfort or much needed catharsis. Sometimes their behaviour and the way it coincides with the specific work may taint the work; sometimes the two aren't closely connected for me (like Asimov - totally sexually assault-ish, but doesn't really connect with my appreciation of his thoughts on robots).
posted by jb at 10:15 AM on July 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
I read him in my early 20s, felt sad when he died, didn't really stay in the biographical loop beyond that; I knew there'd maybe been some backlash against the ubiquity of his posthumous brand but I I wasn't aware that DFW was a creep, or was now regarded as having been a creep.
posted by anazgnos at 10:25 AM on July 26, 2018
posted by anazgnos at 10:25 AM on July 26, 2018
Sorry, but I have to add one more quote by Hannah Gadsby that puts paid to the notion that it's okay to appreciate art by abusive artists. She talks about Picasso and how he raped a 17 yr old when he was 42, and that means every time we consume Picasso's work, it's a giant FUCK YOU to all women and children who have suffered such violations. We don't give a shit. "We look at Picasso, and we look at that 17 year old girl, and we decide that her potential means nothing compared to his."
I've loved and taken comfort from the work of abusive artists, too, but whenever I find out I've done so inadvertently, I also consider it a moral responsibility to, at the very least, stop talking about how wonderful those works are when I am within anyone's earshot. I pray that our love for those works will die with me, and I will do everything in my power to hasten its demise so that its place will soon be occupied by art created by people who are NOT assholes. It's not like there's a dearth of great works in this world of ours.
posted by MiraK at 10:27 AM on July 26, 2018 [23 favorites]
I've loved and taken comfort from the work of abusive artists, too, but whenever I find out I've done so inadvertently, I also consider it a moral responsibility to, at the very least, stop talking about how wonderful those works are when I am within anyone's earshot. I pray that our love for those works will die with me, and I will do everything in my power to hasten its demise so that its place will soon be occupied by art created by people who are NOT assholes. It's not like there's a dearth of great works in this world of ours.
posted by MiraK at 10:27 AM on July 26, 2018 [23 favorites]
The answer for both DFW and Orson Scott Card is: Fuck ‘em. They have lost their right to sit at the adults’ table at the common feast of humanity.
If you want to slum it and consort with them knock yourself out, but I will think less of you for it. If you want to stroke their ego by reading their work then please wash your hands when you’re done.
There are no books, no ideas, no nothing so unique that these people like this should even be mentioned in polite society. So please keep your dirty little secret to yourself and maybe find some less seedy artistic egos to flatter.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:34 AM on July 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
If you want to slum it and consort with them knock yourself out, but I will think less of you for it. If you want to stroke their ego by reading their work then please wash your hands when you’re done.
There are no books, no ideas, no nothing so unique that these people like this should even be mentioned in polite society. So please keep your dirty little secret to yourself and maybe find some less seedy artistic egos to flatter.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:34 AM on July 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
More seriously: an author/artist is not their work. If you don't want to consume things by a living artist because you don't want to give them money,
I've seen this argument before, and it makes the very dubious assumption that money is the reason people went into writing/painting/arting. People feel rewarded in many ways, and cash is only one.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:48 AM on July 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
I've seen this argument before, and it makes the very dubious assumption that money is the reason people went into writing/painting/arting. People feel rewarded in many ways, and cash is only one.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:48 AM on July 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
How much is a Picasso worth if you wiped his name off the canvas?
what does market value have to do with how a work of art might affect me? I suppose if I know something's worth ten million bucks, I might expect more of it, but ideally, the market's got nothing to do with the significant form of the work. Van Gogh only sold two paintings in his lifetime, and they went cheaply at that.
There are no books, no ideas, no nothing so unique that these people like this should even be mentioned in polite society. So please keep your dirty little secret to yourself and maybe find some less seedy artistic egos to flatter.
the puritanism underlying this kind of sentiment horrifies me.
posted by philip-random at 11:16 AM on July 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
what does market value have to do with how a work of art might affect me? I suppose if I know something's worth ten million bucks, I might expect more of it, but ideally, the market's got nothing to do with the significant form of the work. Van Gogh only sold two paintings in his lifetime, and they went cheaply at that.
There are no books, no ideas, no nothing so unique that these people like this should even be mentioned in polite society. So please keep your dirty little secret to yourself and maybe find some less seedy artistic egos to flatter.
the puritanism underlying this kind of sentiment horrifies me.
posted by philip-random at 11:16 AM on July 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
If you want to slum it and consort with them knock yourself out, but I will think less of you for it. If you want to stroke their ego by reading their work then please wash your hands when you’re done.
There are no books, no ideas, no nothing so unique that these people like this should even be mentioned in polite society. So please keep your dirty little secret to yourself and maybe find some less seedy artistic egos to flatter.
Yowza. That's a hell of a line to draw there.
posted by lazaruslong at 11:22 AM on July 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
There are no books, no ideas, no nothing so unique that these people like this should even be mentioned in polite society. So please keep your dirty little secret to yourself and maybe find some less seedy artistic egos to flatter.
Yowza. That's a hell of a line to draw there.
posted by lazaruslong at 11:22 AM on July 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
what does market value have to do with how a work of art might affect me?
It doesn't. The market value argument goes to show the mendacity of this particularly limited form of separating art from the artist: the separation is only supposed to be made in the mind of the individual consumer who may be so inclined, and never ever anywhere else. And of course the artists themselves never want their art separated from themselves!
The argument is designed PURELY to allow the artist to continue to profit from the work (in money, reputation, etc.) - i.e. to ensure the artist suffers no consequences for their transgressions. It's very convenient.
posted by MiraK at 11:31 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
It doesn't. The market value argument goes to show the mendacity of this particularly limited form of separating art from the artist: the separation is only supposed to be made in the mind of the individual consumer who may be so inclined, and never ever anywhere else. And of course the artists themselves never want their art separated from themselves!
The argument is designed PURELY to allow the artist to continue to profit from the work (in money, reputation, etc.) - i.e. to ensure the artist suffers no consequences for their transgressions. It's very convenient.
posted by MiraK at 11:31 AM on July 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
I will do everything in my power to hasten its demise so that its place will soon be occupied by art created by people who are NOT assholes.
In my experience, we're all assholes, some of the time. It's just a matter of how much and how asshole-y. All we can endeavour to be is minimally asshole-ish, and as rarely as possible.
(There's also a lot of lumping of problematic behaviour - sexual harassment is bad, but it's not as bad as child-rape. Recognizing that is being honest and nuanced, not dismissing the problem of sexual harassment).
posted by jb at 11:48 AM on July 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
In my experience, we're all assholes, some of the time. It's just a matter of how much and how asshole-y. All we can endeavour to be is minimally asshole-ish, and as rarely as possible.
(There's also a lot of lumping of problematic behaviour - sexual harassment is bad, but it's not as bad as child-rape. Recognizing that is being honest and nuanced, not dismissing the problem of sexual harassment).
posted by jb at 11:48 AM on July 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
I hope you find that tack sustainable, MiraK. (I wouldn't, but we're different people.) I don't think it's an especially effective strategy to increase awareness and set better tones going forward, and I don't even know that this strategy even necessarily makes women safer around powerful men: the culture of silence and shame raises the stakes for any woman who reports if people believe that believing her and respecting her means that they must give up art that has strong emotional resonance.
But perhaps I'm wrong. There's room enough for differences in tactics in this battle, I think.
posted by sciatrix at 11:48 AM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
But perhaps I'm wrong. There's room enough for differences in tactics in this battle, I think.
posted by sciatrix at 11:48 AM on July 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
I come at this question from a different perspective - I am a statistician and my field was founded by a bunch of eugenicists. We can’t really give up Pearson’s correlation, nor the insights of his forebear Galton. I mean, it’s not the be all end all of statistics, of course, but it does a thing we often want done. So what I take from that is that professional ethics require me to think about how my own work may be misused; that my colleagues and I may be capable of great evil; that I may be ignorant today of what will come to be recognized as evil tomorrow.
There may be a good argument for why literature and art are different from science here, that I’m not meant to think of Pearson when someone mentions Woody Allen. I’d be happy to hear it if so. I will say I don’t feel a lot of urgency to read the works of DFW after what’s been said. With our limited time here we need shortcuts, and he doesn’t seem to be a shortcut to anywhere I want to go. But Pearson is; and so I imagine there may be similar artists, people without whose work I will be (perhaps am) missing something key. I think culturally we need some way to deal with this. I’m all for changing the subject when it is possible, but what do we do when it is not?
posted by eirias at 1:54 PM on July 26, 2018 [15 favorites]
There may be a good argument for why literature and art are different from science here, that I’m not meant to think of Pearson when someone mentions Woody Allen. I’d be happy to hear it if so. I will say I don’t feel a lot of urgency to read the works of DFW after what’s been said. With our limited time here we need shortcuts, and he doesn’t seem to be a shortcut to anywhere I want to go. But Pearson is; and so I imagine there may be similar artists, people without whose work I will be (perhaps am) missing something key. I think culturally we need some way to deal with this. I’m all for changing the subject when it is possible, but what do we do when it is not?
posted by eirias at 1:54 PM on July 26, 2018 [15 favorites]
She talks about Picasso and how he raped a 17 yr old when he was 42, and that means every time we consume Picasso's work, it's a giant FUCK YOU to all women and children who have suffered such violations. We don't give a shit.
Time to put on my asbestos suit, but here goes: this is a common pattern of thinking that I've encountered in a lot of discussions around objectionable artists and the consumption of their art, and I've never been able to follow it.
The consumption of works by an artist who has done horrible things is a "fuck you" to the entire group(s) that the affected person/people belonged to, and the mere act of consumption, context be damned, means that "we don't give a shit"? That makes no sense. It's a handwavy, sweeping non sequitur, or at least a massive overreach. It reads like a weird shaming tactic borne out of (by itself, fully justified) personal anger and disgust at the artist.
It's not like there's just one mode of consumption. If you uncritically venerate the ostensible genius of a known problematic artist and fail to clearly acknowledge their sins, then yes, that's disrespectful to (at least) the specific people who suffered due to the artist's actions, and it can be argued that there are other negative consequences to it as well. However, consuming the art for the objective* qualities that caused it to be worthy of note in the first place, aware of all the necessary context and without specific veneration or evangelization of the person behind it, can hardly be treated the same, because it isn't.
People who stop consuming works by problematic artists are fully within their rights to do so, and they should not be faulted for it in any way. Painting the remaining consumers of those works as bad people, however, without regard to the context and mode of, and reason for consumption, doesn't hold up under any kind of scrutiny.
* I know jack shit about capital-A Art, but I have to assume that venerated works of art are venerated for at least some objective or so-commonly-accepted-as-to-be-effectively-unassailable reasons? If a widespread critical consensus of the high quality of a specific work of art exists and persists beyond short-term fashionability, or in some cases, cult of personality, surely that has to be based on something concrete? If not, then I guess all of art is a lie and everything around it is entirely emperor's-new-clothes-arbitrary, but that's beside the point.
There are no books, no ideas, no nothing so unique that these people like this should even be mentioned in polite society. So please keep your dirty little secret to yourself and maybe find some less seedy artistic egos to flatter.
I can see where you're coming from, but this is far too simplistic, and your hostility is misplaced. I'm fine with reappraising previously highly regarded people, seeing them as the shitheels they are as their misconduct becomes public knowledge. I'd also encourage anyone to make the effort to look beyond artists with white/male/cis/etc. privilege, and to avoid recommending shitty people and their works, no matter their notability, to most people in most situations, with caveats. Still, any sufficiently notable artist will be relevant to consumption and discussion in specific situations (usually with an expiry date; time will consign most artists to footnotes in history, after all) due to their influence on the wider culture, regardless of their personal failings. Trying to pretend otherwise is absurd.
TL;DR: avoid giving undue exposure to problematic artists (try to favor others), but realize that sometimes there are good reasons for discussing them and consuming their works in various contexts.
posted by jklaiho at 1:55 PM on July 26, 2018 [26 favorites]
Time to put on my asbestos suit, but here goes: this is a common pattern of thinking that I've encountered in a lot of discussions around objectionable artists and the consumption of their art, and I've never been able to follow it.
The consumption of works by an artist who has done horrible things is a "fuck you" to the entire group(s) that the affected person/people belonged to, and the mere act of consumption, context be damned, means that "we don't give a shit"? That makes no sense. It's a handwavy, sweeping non sequitur, or at least a massive overreach. It reads like a weird shaming tactic borne out of (by itself, fully justified) personal anger and disgust at the artist.
It's not like there's just one mode of consumption. If you uncritically venerate the ostensible genius of a known problematic artist and fail to clearly acknowledge their sins, then yes, that's disrespectful to (at least) the specific people who suffered due to the artist's actions, and it can be argued that there are other negative consequences to it as well. However, consuming the art for the objective* qualities that caused it to be worthy of note in the first place, aware of all the necessary context and without specific veneration or evangelization of the person behind it, can hardly be treated the same, because it isn't.
People who stop consuming works by problematic artists are fully within their rights to do so, and they should not be faulted for it in any way. Painting the remaining consumers of those works as bad people, however, without regard to the context and mode of, and reason for consumption, doesn't hold up under any kind of scrutiny.
* I know jack shit about capital-A Art, but I have to assume that venerated works of art are venerated for at least some objective or so-commonly-accepted-as-to-be-effectively-unassailable reasons? If a widespread critical consensus of the high quality of a specific work of art exists and persists beyond short-term fashionability, or in some cases, cult of personality, surely that has to be based on something concrete? If not, then I guess all of art is a lie and everything around it is entirely emperor's-new-clothes-arbitrary, but that's beside the point.
There are no books, no ideas, no nothing so unique that these people like this should even be mentioned in polite society. So please keep your dirty little secret to yourself and maybe find some less seedy artistic egos to flatter.
I can see where you're coming from, but this is far too simplistic, and your hostility is misplaced. I'm fine with reappraising previously highly regarded people, seeing them as the shitheels they are as their misconduct becomes public knowledge. I'd also encourage anyone to make the effort to look beyond artists with white/male/cis/etc. privilege, and to avoid recommending shitty people and their works, no matter their notability, to most people in most situations, with caveats. Still, any sufficiently notable artist will be relevant to consumption and discussion in specific situations (usually with an expiry date; time will consign most artists to footnotes in history, after all) due to their influence on the wider culture, regardless of their personal failings. Trying to pretend otherwise is absurd.
TL;DR: avoid giving undue exposure to problematic artists (try to favor others), but realize that sometimes there are good reasons for discussing them and consuming their works in various contexts.
posted by jklaiho at 1:55 PM on July 26, 2018 [26 favorites]
That makes no sense. It's a handwavy, sweeping non sequitur, or at least a massive overreach.
I guess for me when I see someone like Picasso lauded, I feel like society is saying, "you're a rapist, but you wrote a great book! "
And, for me, that kind of implicitly places great art above women not being raped (and let's face it, it's almost always something being done to women... That's also saying something about what society values).
I don't think a great piece of art is worth anyone's mental health, physical safety, etc. Not one person's.
Now I know, engaging with this art, from a consequentialist perspective is not going to turn back time, stop the rape etc.
But I don't want to, if I can avoid it, be a part of normalising a discourse that I feel is saying "sometimes rape is a by product of great art, and it's not as important as the art." I think it should always be more important, and I feel its part of a broader discourse where women's lives in particular are viewed as less important.
In my small country one woman a week is being killed through domestic violence. I see this stuff as part of a broader culture, and I don't want to support that, and I don't need to support that.
posted by smoke at 2:55 PM on July 26, 2018 [14 favorites]
I guess for me when I see someone like Picasso lauded, I feel like society is saying, "you're a rapist, but you wrote a great book! "
And, for me, that kind of implicitly places great art above women not being raped (and let's face it, it's almost always something being done to women... That's also saying something about what society values).
I don't think a great piece of art is worth anyone's mental health, physical safety, etc. Not one person's.
Now I know, engaging with this art, from a consequentialist perspective is not going to turn back time, stop the rape etc.
But I don't want to, if I can avoid it, be a part of normalising a discourse that I feel is saying "sometimes rape is a by product of great art, and it's not as important as the art." I think it should always be more important, and I feel its part of a broader discourse where women's lives in particular are viewed as less important.
In my small country one woman a week is being killed through domestic violence. I see this stuff as part of a broader culture, and I don't want to support that, and I don't need to support that.
posted by smoke at 2:55 PM on July 26, 2018 [14 favorites]
Where's the best place to start not reading Wallace?
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:52 PM on July 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by turbid dahlia at 5:52 PM on July 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
I just happened upon Brief Interviews With Hideous Men many years ago, & read it, not knowing a thing about the author or Infinite Jest’s existence. I thoroughly enjoyed it at the time, & of course his name started to pop up more & more, but I only gave Infinite Jest one weak try before giving up a couple dozen pages in. The Alexie thing was alarming & dismaying yes, & at this point, Brief Interviews... just seems a little too, you know, real.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:47 PM on July 26, 2018
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:47 PM on July 26, 2018
Sorry, but I have to add one more quote by Hannah Gadsby that puts paid to the notion that it's okay to appreciate art by abusive artists. She talks about Picasso and how he raped a 17 yr old when he was 42
I know Picasso was not a very nice person and that his relationship with Walter was abusive in various ways, but I haven't heard this and I can't find anything about it. Where does Gadsby say this?
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 10:40 PM on July 26, 2018
I know Picasso was not a very nice person and that his relationship with Walter was abusive in various ways, but I haven't heard this and I can't find anything about it. Where does Gadsby say this?
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 10:40 PM on July 26, 2018
It’s in her comedy performance called Nanette; it’s on (UK) Netflix right now.
posted by iamkimiam at 11:36 PM on July 26, 2018
posted by iamkimiam at 11:36 PM on July 26, 2018
I totally get how some people feel that abusive men should have their works kicked out of museums. I personally feel differently about people who are alive/ were recently alive and those hundreds of years old. In one case, there are victims who deserve acknowledgement and justice and public condemnation of abusive behaviour. But when it's so long ago.... I think yes, we should append "and terrible abusive person" to their official public image, but what comes to mind for me is architecture. I'm sure some of the people who designed interesting, listed buildings were total abusive assholes, but we're unlikely to raze the buildings or say people shouldn't live in them, because we tend to think of jobs that happen to involve some artistic expression as totally different from art. I'm not entirely convinced by that. Someone can accomplish both good and terrible in their lifetime. We can acknowledge that a historical figure contributed to society one way (art, building libraries, advances in science) whilst simultaneously acknowledging they were a detriment to society and damaging to individuals in other ways they behaved.
Then it becomes an argument about whether the works of art have genuine artistic merit worth keeping around, or whether it's there because it was done by a white man with the right sort of friends. I'm sure there are some that fall into the latter category, and museums should definitely be trying to move away from Famous White Men as their linchpin I think, but I personally feel sure there are some paintings in the former category where something would be lost.
posted by stillnocturnal at 1:43 AM on July 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Then it becomes an argument about whether the works of art have genuine artistic merit worth keeping around, or whether it's there because it was done by a white man with the right sort of friends. I'm sure there are some that fall into the latter category, and museums should definitely be trying to move away from Famous White Men as their linchpin I think, but I personally feel sure there are some paintings in the former category where something would be lost.
posted by stillnocturnal at 1:43 AM on July 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I don't think a great piece of art is worth anyone's mental health, physical safety, etc. Not one person's.
An exception has to made for the artist's, no?
Because that's a whole lot of great art. Most, maybe.
posted by rokusan at 3:16 AM on July 27, 2018
An exception has to made for the artist's, no?
Because that's a whole lot of great art. Most, maybe.
posted by rokusan at 3:16 AM on July 27, 2018
Van Gogh only sold two paintings in his lifetime, and they went cheaply at that.
Gadsby spoke about that too. How it was the love and support of his brother that meant he sold anything at all and that we've even heard of him today. So compassion for others is what broadens art and it's meaning.
But who gets our compassion? Does it always have to be the white male artist or could we extend it to other artists like Mary Karr as well?
posted by harriet vane at 6:59 AM on July 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
Gadsby spoke about that too. How it was the love and support of his brother that meant he sold anything at all and that we've even heard of him today. So compassion for others is what broadens art and it's meaning.
But who gets our compassion? Does it always have to be the white male artist or could we extend it to other artists like Mary Karr as well?
posted by harriet vane at 6:59 AM on July 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
It’s in her comedy performance called Nanette; it’s on (UK) Netflix right now.
Also on US Netflix. Note: while parts of it are very funny and she's an astute social commentator in a direction rarely seen by something with this sort of distribution (and in a way that I think will resonate with MeFites particularly) I would not necessarily call this a comedy performance as much as a one-woman show by a n accomplished comedian.
posted by jessamyn at 8:21 AM on July 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
Also on US Netflix. Note: while parts of it are very funny and she's an astute social commentator in a direction rarely seen by something with this sort of distribution (and in a way that I think will resonate with MeFites particularly) I would not necessarily call this a comedy performance as much as a one-woman show by a n accomplished comedian.
posted by jessamyn at 8:21 AM on July 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
Yes, this. I have seen so much commentary that Gadsby has "changed the face of stand-up forever," when instead I think this was a superb one-woman theatrical show, by a comedian, using stand-up comedy as a launching point. I think it makes the work bigger and not smaller to situate it in the tradition of Anna Deavere Smith, Spalding Gray, etc.
posted by PhineasGage at 12:23 PM on July 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by PhineasGage at 12:23 PM on July 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
How it was the love and support of his brother
The love and support of his brother and his wife. His wife in particular spent a lot of time after his death managing his art and getting his name out there.
posted by Deoridhe at 12:53 PM on July 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
The love and support of his brother and his wife. His wife in particular spent a lot of time after his death managing his art and getting his name out there.
posted by Deoridhe at 12:53 PM on July 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
Van Gogh had a wife? Oh my god I HAD NO CLUE, I thought he only had a brother be responsible for that, hooray more evidence of women's invisibilized labor
posted by yueliang at 4:53 PM on July 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by yueliang at 4:53 PM on July 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
It was his brother Theo's wife Johanna Bonger. Theo died six months after Vincent and Theo's wife was really the brains behind the whole publication of Vincent's letters. There's a great little one-off Netflix bit on her in the Raiders of the Lost Art series.
posted by jessamyn at 5:01 PM on July 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by jessamyn at 5:01 PM on July 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
This conversation seldom goes particularly well, because there's simultaneously too much at stake, emotionally and structurally, and so very little. Very few people in the world have even read a book in the last year, let alone give a shit who DFW is. But the bigger problems are hard.
At the risk of sounding fatuous, this usually boils down to:
Can bad people make good art?
Is there such a thing as objectively bad people?
Is there such a thing as objectively good art?
Do we gain any more from getting rid of something held to be good that was produced by someone held to be bad, than we do from keeping that thing around to talk about it?
To what extent does intentionality matter, especially to work that can only tangentially or macroscopically be related back to the problems we have with its author?
I hate Ayn Rand and Hayek and am not a huge fan of Kant or the bible, but I still think all of those are worth engaging with, even if just so you can argue against people who accept them unquestioningly, because you will eventually run into them.
But I can totally see why someone wouldn't agree. Hell, I've made a parlor game of conversational escape hatches for things I just don't want to waste any brainpower or conversational wind on (sports, Star Wars).
The purity policing that comes out around art/intentionality often escalates to the extreme of getting rid of everything and starting over, and maybe that's a good idea! There certainly are museums selling off their blue chip art to start fresh with works by people who aren't old dead white men.
Sadly, most of what ended up being saved of human endeavor for a millennium was either done by, produced under power structures controlled by, or chosen for preservation by old dead (often white) men, *most* of whom probably did things that we now hold to be generally pretty shitty. I'm not really sure what we do about that.
Maybe it really is to stop reading DFW and talking about Kevin Spacey's old movies and to never speak of the Cosby Show again. Not forever, just, you know, a timeout. It's possible that somehow changes things socially and pushes us to a place where toxic misbehaving jerks who aren't in the public eye change their behavior. I'd like to think there's a happy medium somewhere, where we can still talk about the work of problematic artists in such a way that it doesn't take airtime away from people who aren't known to be shitty.
who gets our compassion?
Ideally everyone, but it sure seems to be spread on the side of the people who already had all the other stuff.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:44 PM on July 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
At the risk of sounding fatuous, this usually boils down to:
Can bad people make good art?
Is there such a thing as objectively bad people?
Is there such a thing as objectively good art?
Do we gain any more from getting rid of something held to be good that was produced by someone held to be bad, than we do from keeping that thing around to talk about it?
To what extent does intentionality matter, especially to work that can only tangentially or macroscopically be related back to the problems we have with its author?
I hate Ayn Rand and Hayek and am not a huge fan of Kant or the bible, but I still think all of those are worth engaging with, even if just so you can argue against people who accept them unquestioningly, because you will eventually run into them.
But I can totally see why someone wouldn't agree. Hell, I've made a parlor game of conversational escape hatches for things I just don't want to waste any brainpower or conversational wind on (sports, Star Wars).
The purity policing that comes out around art/intentionality often escalates to the extreme of getting rid of everything and starting over, and maybe that's a good idea! There certainly are museums selling off their blue chip art to start fresh with works by people who aren't old dead white men.
Sadly, most of what ended up being saved of human endeavor for a millennium was either done by, produced under power structures controlled by, or chosen for preservation by old dead (often white) men, *most* of whom probably did things that we now hold to be generally pretty shitty. I'm not really sure what we do about that.
Maybe it really is to stop reading DFW and talking about Kevin Spacey's old movies and to never speak of the Cosby Show again. Not forever, just, you know, a timeout. It's possible that somehow changes things socially and pushes us to a place where toxic misbehaving jerks who aren't in the public eye change their behavior. I'd like to think there's a happy medium somewhere, where we can still talk about the work of problematic artists in such a way that it doesn't take airtime away from people who aren't known to be shitty.
who gets our compassion?
Ideally everyone, but it sure seems to be spread on the side of the people who already had all the other stuff.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:44 PM on July 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
Here's a very thoughtful new long-read on the question "can we still enjoy the work of predatory artists?..."
posted by PhineasGage at 2:34 PM on July 30, 2018
posted by PhineasGage at 2:34 PM on July 30, 2018
I really disliked that read, mostly because the author seems to not want to address any of the issues. Sex crimes differ from murder, because murder is rarely a systematic and ongoing process on the part of any single individual writer. Contemporary artists stilll benefit from visibility, in ways that Ben Johnson can’t. (Woodie Allen is fully able to read flattering reviews, for example.)
As for what life would be without Dickens, well, it would probably be a world in which we replaced his work with his contemporaries — something that I think might make our English syllabi a bit more diverse. I must have read three or four Dickens works in middle and high school. Maybe we could read _Wives and Daughters_, for example, or maybe my male schoolmates would be forced to (the horror!) read Jane Austen. I think it is a world that is well worth exploring, regardless of Dickens’s moral character.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:49 AM on July 31, 2018 [6 favorites]
As for what life would be without Dickens, well, it would probably be a world in which we replaced his work with his contemporaries — something that I think might make our English syllabi a bit more diverse. I must have read three or four Dickens works in middle and high school. Maybe we could read _Wives and Daughters_, for example, or maybe my male schoolmates would be forced to (the horror!) read Jane Austen. I think it is a world that is well worth exploring, regardless of Dickens’s moral character.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:49 AM on July 31, 2018 [6 favorites]
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