My dad was watching a baseball game when one of the best players stepped up to bat. "You know, that guy can really play ball. It's really too bad he's such a shit-ass."
Unfortunately the art world has some shit-asses too. There are the Leni Riefenstahls of the world, who have been associated with abominable things and whose art, too, is associated with those things. Their stuff is easy to admire once in a while from a technical standpoint and then stay away from the rest of the time. How often do I really want to watch Nazi propaganda, no matter how artfully directed? And then there are people like Chris Brown who do abominable things but the content of their art is unrelated. But the Chris Browns and Mel Gibsons of the world don't bother me so much either because their art sucks and I would've disliked it anyway. But then there are the Wagners, the Larry Riverses, the Buster Keatonses whose stuff is a little harder to stay away from.
Sometimes I have to bend backward over historical attitudes to appreciate art. Wagner was a raging anti-semite and even in his time that wasn't completely acceptable. But it was a lot more accepted by his society, pre-Holocaust and chauvinistically Christian. Caravaggio actually committed murder, which wasn't historically acceptable but I guess it was such a long time ago no one really cares anymore. And I adore Buster Keaton's silent movies... but not the black-face scene in The College. I get the feeling that it was completely acceptable to white Americans in the twenties, and all in good fun but there is no way I feel ok watching that. And Hugh Laurie, whom I adore, appeared in black-face in the fantastic series Wooster & Jeeves, which is so recent that I was absolutely shocked by that scene.
And then there's Larry Rivers, a contemporary artist who died in 2002 who made a "documentary" film of his two daughters growing up through puberty, which is so insensitively made it is certainly tantamount to sexual abuse and possibly child pornography. His daughters, now adults, seem to have been hurt by his actions and do not approve the artwork or the public's possession of it. There's really no historical attitude he can hide behind, either. It colors the rest of his work for me; for some reason knowledge of sexual abuse, more than anything else, affects how I see a person's every action thereafter. I think people see Roman Polanski's movies the same way now. Drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl is pretty hard to forget. All his films are a little ickier now.
But I have the option of stretching to see beyond that. After all, if I can appreciate a Wagner piece or freak out in front of Rosemary's Baby I can only gain from that experience. Mahler, who was Jewish until converting for possibly political reasons, welcomed the chance to conduct Wagner pieces, remarking that Wagner had never composed an anti-semitic note. Ultimately if I reject great art because it's tainted, I lose out.
Not everyone sees it that way though. Denial seems to be a popular option. But even IF members of the general public acknowledge that the artist did a terrible thing, many people declassify the art as "art." I definitely consider Rivers' documentary to be art as well as evidence of sexual abuse but the popular opinion of commenters who did not defend his actions was that the film was simply not art and he was simply not an artist. People also seem to be piping up to say that Polanski's films are not all that great, or that a filmmaker isn't really an artist, or some variation on the theme of "Hollywood blows." The drummer from the Velvet Underground has recently joined the Tea Party movement, which is seen as politically reprehensible to the leftist fanbase. Suddenly comment sections are peppered with, "whatever, the Velvets weren't that great anyway. And she was just a drummer." This is easy to get away with because many people can't see weird contemporary art as art even when morality isn't an issue. We're still expecting museums to be filled with Monets. (This isn't applicable to problematic art that predates Modernism, perhaps, because the art historians have declared it to be Great and no one can really argue with that).
People are kind of hostile to art, ready to take it down a few notches at the slightest provocation. This may seem like a leap but I associate this attitude with mob attitudes toward minorities. When women fail to please or act "wrong" people claim she's not really a woman: she's got a penis hidden in her pants, she's a cold childless un-mother, she's just a whore, she's unfuckable. People do this to Black people sometimes too, sadly. "So & So doesn't act how I think Black people act, therefore they're White at heart [insert offensive food product slang here]." It happens, in fact, to most people at some point in their lives for some reason.
The common problem, it seems, is that people are trying to define the world without listening to other people's definitions of themselves and their worlds, without accepting that paradoxes and contradictions exist (usually even within one's own rigid definitions). Maybe it's easier to start expanding one's mind with morally ambiguous artwork, and then tackle something else a little tougher.
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