This week’s episode is just a taster of a topic i’ve been marinating on for a while so I’m not really coming to a solid conclusion here, but more so raising the topic and sharing some recent resources that had me thinking more about this predicament we unfortunately find ourselves in when it comes to artists who have problematic pasts.I’m not one to jump to cancelling people for mistakes or missteps and I don’t think everything should be politicised quite as much as it is right now. But then on the other hand it’s sometimes hard to look away or disregard certain actions or behaviour and simply go on enjoying an artists work. But then again what if it’s one of the greatest pieces of art ever created like Manhattan and Annie hall? Below are some links to things I mention in the video if you’re interested.
I was recently speaking with a friend how I really like Terry Richardson’s photo style and like to adapt that to other genres. This came with a strange reaction and plenty of questions as to be suspected.
Yes, I understand the man is a scumbag and deserves full punishment for his actions.
But can you still be inspired by the art and not the artist?
Marc we have so much in common! Terry’s work is hugely influential to me and if I hadn’t seen his photos growing up I’m not sure I would even be interested in photography.
I’ve had so many raised eyebrows for siting him as an inspiration though so I know what you mean. I also get tired having to constantly caveat it with acknowledging his behaviour, because yes obviously not good, but I believe we should be able to talk about the imagery he created or the way he pioneered a whole style and movement in the way fashion photography was done. His punk rock approach of using a point and shoot made me feel like I could also do that. That’s my experience and I’m allowed to have that whilst also being aware and not condoning his problematic behaviour throughout his career but not needing to mention it if I don’t want to. That’s my right and I don’t think we should police others interests or inspiration sources.
Love that you are taking his style into your gig photos too - so cool 📸
You put that so well, I normally just avoid speaking of his work because of the same conversation that comes up. But those photos were and still are very inspirational in how I like to make my own look. I brought a yashica t4 years ago to try and replicate.
I have a really big project I’m working on, lots of portraits. All with point and shoots, so that inspo lives on, even if others avoid it.
Difficult questions for which there are seldom easy answers. Yes, I think each case has to be considered in its own context, allowing that social mores have changed over the years and that it would be both short-sighted and in bad faith to judge every historical period through the already clouded lens of the present. Bad actions are bad actions, yes, but humans are at once extremely malleable and easily confused creatures, inclined to take their moral cues from the system in which they operate. On a basic level, this doesn't excuse malfeasance, but is certainly a mitigating factor in evaluating an individual's overall character.
Ultimately, it seems that the most virulent outrage is reserved for those who have cynically leveraged power imbalances for their own pleasure and I am very much sympathetic towards the rage that has built up against this pattern--centuries of a certain kind of rich, white man acting with impunity. The Weinsteins of this world deserve our disgust, certainly. But not all power dynamics are so clearly delineated and there is often more at play than money and patriarchy. This too changes with context.
Generally, I'm ill at ease with the cultural revisionism of cancelling any but the most problematic actors and think that society benefits much more from acknowledging and discussing its past than from pretending it didn't happen. That we have edited even the mildest instances of "unkind language" out of Roald Dahl's books, for example, feels both dishonest and a missed opportunity to talk to children about how words can hurt people. Again, in more extreme cases, such as open hate speech or the use of inflammatory racial slurs, we have to be more careful about what we platform and promote exposure to.
But my biggest problem with the cancelling phenomenon comes down to "moral authority". Who has the right to judge? Why? What do we know about those rendering judgement? We have seen time and time again forces of outrage coalescing into a blind, amorphous mob which is spared scrutiny of its own constituent parts and becomes itself amoral, operating on sheer momentum alone without recourse to due process or counterbalancing argument.
I have lived twenty years with mental illness and the various other problems that come with it and I have behaved in ways that I am not proud of. I refuse to become the moral arbiter of anything beyond my own immediate experience--the things I personally choose to engage with. Beyond that, I refer to my own fallibility. In other words, who am I to ethically police society, and for that matter, who is anyone else?
The best we can do, I think, is take accountability as individuals, consuming mindfully and talking honestly without recourse to tribalism or toxic fandom. Fitzgerald wrote that the true test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one's mind at the same time and still be able to function and I think this is something our current society does not do well, especially when it comes to ethics, where we prefer simple binaries. We can feel both love and hate at the same time.
Anyway, I've written a frickin' essay here. My apologies. I guess something just went off in my head, prompted by your argument. I appreciate it.
Oh my god! Well I think you need to have a substack of you don’t already!!!????
This was so well put and I feel that the microphone should have been in your hands for this episode haha 😆
I 💯 agree with you on all of this actually and it’s basically how I feel to a tee so thank you for putting it so eloquently. The part about who is the judge is so true and such a problem when we start picking each other. Minor things that offend certain people etc. just makes many loose patience and empathy for the larger things we could all be collectively trying to change.
You’ve mentioned tribalism or super fandom too and that’s it right? It’s so dogmatic and split down the line and it’s displaced a lot of people because as you say you can’t hold to differing opinions or have nuance in conversation anymore without risk of being tarred with a brush that then banishes you from a certain group. We end up all so split that we can’t come together and make any real change because everyone’s fight is so individually measured and specific to them.
I just find socialising a struggle these days and I feel very stifled often and that’s not a world I want to live in.
Thank you for such a thought out comment and I hope to see more writing from you on here! Take care
Thanks, Lucy! I always look forward to your content on Substack and YouTube and love it that you’ve directed so many photographers to this platform. My substack is brand new, still really finding its feet. I write about photography (and art in general), but with a broader, more philosophical (maybe?) perspective. Anyway, eager to see what you put out next.
Obviously, there is a spectrum of cancel. If someone is a bit of a jerk, it's ok to still engage with their art, and it can often complicate the projections that I put on the piece. It doesn't bother me that someone like Mick Jagger may have been arrogant and difficult.
However, there is an amorphous line when it becomes impossible. Kanye West has lost me, for example. By going beyond "being a bit of a dick" into full-blown Nazism, it's just hard for me to listen to him without his anti-Semitic rhetoric being the first thing I think about.
Yes i agree on the spectrum of cancel and it’s not a straight up and down thing - it’s gonna be different every time.
I’m not really a Kanye fan to begin with but I do think he was a clever person for what he created etc. even though it’s not my thing. He seems really mentally unstable to me and it seems odd that he would be saying all of those things and truly mean them but who knows. It seemed like watching someone completely unravel and loose control but again it’s all personal right? If his words affect you then it’s gonna taint the work.
I feel the same about Britney Spears (she hasn’t done anything wrong) who as a child I grew up loving and now it seems she is also really unhinged and it’s horrible to watch. I find it emotional to see her in the early days and think of how I viewed her then and what she has been through and ended up as now.
I think it’s hard for public figures like that because we place so much on them by liking them and then also by hating them when they do wrong or fall victim to something or are reveled to be just plain old evil people.
Humans are so complicated. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here I appreciate it.
I think a lot of people sort of pity Kanye as he is clearly unwell and doesn’t seem in control of his behaviour. I guess that is why there doesn’t seem to be as much of an effort to cancel him as you’d expect. Also when someone is blatantly saying outrageous things openly it’s weirdly harder to cancel than to discover something done or said behind closed doors that gets exposed.
Great topic. Back when I was an English teacher one of the annoying things that would happen would be forcing student to buy the latest edition of "the Norton Anthology of English Literature" or the like. 90% of it would be the same as the previous edition (which could be had used for half the price) but 10% or so would be authors added or deleted. Ezra Pound is a good example even though he was an American. He was a Fascist collaborator in Italy. He was sort of "cancelled" in the sense that he doesn't show up in introductory anthologies but you can still take graduate classes on him. The idea being anyone should be able to read or study whatever they want but fewer and fewer are *required* to study him.
Yes I totally agree that we should be able to still learn about these people and their output, even if it’s less than ideal or plain evil. Burying things and canceling them doesn’t help society to move forward or understand the why behind the behaviour etc.
I am a big fan of the book Lolita which I think is written so beautifully as in the writing is lie nothing else I’ve ever read and he is very skilled but it’s topic is obviously extremely problematic. I feel I can’t say I like the book though for fear of being seen as a collaborator or someone who agrees with every aspect of the book.
Thanks for reading and interesting to know you were English teacher. Lux my partner was a teacher for many years too.
I think that part of the issue is when we put people on a pedestal and serve them up as being larger than life. There are some people who have had huge impacts on the arts of all types who simply are not great people. The issue then becomes whether their work is problematic vs whether they are problematic. As you note, there are no good answers to that. A great example, in addition to those already mentioned, is Tom Cruze who is generally considered a jerk by those I have talked to who knew him in one capacity or another. He has a huge body of very popular works, and he is generally a “good” actor but not one that people like to work with. Again, this comes from people I have talked to who have had interactions with him outside of Hollywood. Does this invalidate his work? I don’t know. Anyway, good topic to raise in these crazy times we live in.
The ethics of admiration, yes this seems to shape our public thought in recent years. I haven't arrived at many answers either but I'm loving this conversation.
For me , it's like the difference between Criminal Law and Civil Law. If someone commits a crime (e.g. he/she breaks the "criminal" law of the land) they get what they deserve and, in certain circumstances, I think society as a whole would find it hard to see them as ever having been rehabilitated. I'm thinking of individuals such as Epstein, Weinstein, Gary Glitter, etc. Some "artists" / celebrities seem to work on the basis that "all publicity is good publicity" and appear to court controversy as a way of keeping their profile in the public's line of sight. These are, I think the "grey area' to which you refer, Lucy. Thankfully, I seldom have to consider whether to cancel them or not cancel them as, for example, it would never occur to me to listen to "music" by Kanye West as (a) I'm not remotely into that musical genre and (b) his opinion on any subject is of as much interest to me as his "music". If he, or anyone else, oversteps the line and doesn't just offend the general public's sensibilities but actually breaks the law, then yes, "cancel" them in any way that the law prescribes as appropriate. Personally, I try not to sweat the petty stuff.
I was recently speaking with a friend how I really like Terry Richardson’s photo style and like to adapt that to other genres. This came with a strange reaction and plenty of questions as to be suspected.
Yes, I understand the man is a scumbag and deserves full punishment for his actions.
But can you still be inspired by the art and not the artist?
Marc we have so much in common! Terry’s work is hugely influential to me and if I hadn’t seen his photos growing up I’m not sure I would even be interested in photography.
I’ve had so many raised eyebrows for siting him as an inspiration though so I know what you mean. I also get tired having to constantly caveat it with acknowledging his behaviour, because yes obviously not good, but I believe we should be able to talk about the imagery he created or the way he pioneered a whole style and movement in the way fashion photography was done. His punk rock approach of using a point and shoot made me feel like I could also do that. That’s my experience and I’m allowed to have that whilst also being aware and not condoning his problematic behaviour throughout his career but not needing to mention it if I don’t want to. That’s my right and I don’t think we should police others interests or inspiration sources.
Love that you are taking his style into your gig photos too - so cool 📸
So refreshing to hear, and I agree.
You put that so well, I normally just avoid speaking of his work because of the same conversation that comes up. But those photos were and still are very inspirational in how I like to make my own look. I brought a yashica t4 years ago to try and replicate.
I have a really big project I’m working on, lots of portraits. All with point and shoots, so that inspo lives on, even if others avoid it.
Difficult questions for which there are seldom easy answers. Yes, I think each case has to be considered in its own context, allowing that social mores have changed over the years and that it would be both short-sighted and in bad faith to judge every historical period through the already clouded lens of the present. Bad actions are bad actions, yes, but humans are at once extremely malleable and easily confused creatures, inclined to take their moral cues from the system in which they operate. On a basic level, this doesn't excuse malfeasance, but is certainly a mitigating factor in evaluating an individual's overall character.
Ultimately, it seems that the most virulent outrage is reserved for those who have cynically leveraged power imbalances for their own pleasure and I am very much sympathetic towards the rage that has built up against this pattern--centuries of a certain kind of rich, white man acting with impunity. The Weinsteins of this world deserve our disgust, certainly. But not all power dynamics are so clearly delineated and there is often more at play than money and patriarchy. This too changes with context.
Generally, I'm ill at ease with the cultural revisionism of cancelling any but the most problematic actors and think that society benefits much more from acknowledging and discussing its past than from pretending it didn't happen. That we have edited even the mildest instances of "unkind language" out of Roald Dahl's books, for example, feels both dishonest and a missed opportunity to talk to children about how words can hurt people. Again, in more extreme cases, such as open hate speech or the use of inflammatory racial slurs, we have to be more careful about what we platform and promote exposure to.
But my biggest problem with the cancelling phenomenon comes down to "moral authority". Who has the right to judge? Why? What do we know about those rendering judgement? We have seen time and time again forces of outrage coalescing into a blind, amorphous mob which is spared scrutiny of its own constituent parts and becomes itself amoral, operating on sheer momentum alone without recourse to due process or counterbalancing argument.
I have lived twenty years with mental illness and the various other problems that come with it and I have behaved in ways that I am not proud of. I refuse to become the moral arbiter of anything beyond my own immediate experience--the things I personally choose to engage with. Beyond that, I refer to my own fallibility. In other words, who am I to ethically police society, and for that matter, who is anyone else?
The best we can do, I think, is take accountability as individuals, consuming mindfully and talking honestly without recourse to tribalism or toxic fandom. Fitzgerald wrote that the true test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one's mind at the same time and still be able to function and I think this is something our current society does not do well, especially when it comes to ethics, where we prefer simple binaries. We can feel both love and hate at the same time.
Anyway, I've written a frickin' essay here. My apologies. I guess something just went off in my head, prompted by your argument. I appreciate it.
Oh my god! Well I think you need to have a substack of you don’t already!!!????
This was so well put and I feel that the microphone should have been in your hands for this episode haha 😆
I 💯 agree with you on all of this actually and it’s basically how I feel to a tee so thank you for putting it so eloquently. The part about who is the judge is so true and such a problem when we start picking each other. Minor things that offend certain people etc. just makes many loose patience and empathy for the larger things we could all be collectively trying to change.
You’ve mentioned tribalism or super fandom too and that’s it right? It’s so dogmatic and split down the line and it’s displaced a lot of people because as you say you can’t hold to differing opinions or have nuance in conversation anymore without risk of being tarred with a brush that then banishes you from a certain group. We end up all so split that we can’t come together and make any real change because everyone’s fight is so individually measured and specific to them.
I just find socialising a struggle these days and I feel very stifled often and that’s not a world I want to live in.
Thank you for such a thought out comment and I hope to see more writing from you on here! Take care
Thanks, Lucy! I always look forward to your content on Substack and YouTube and love it that you’ve directed so many photographers to this platform. My substack is brand new, still really finding its feet. I write about photography (and art in general), but with a broader, more philosophical (maybe?) perspective. Anyway, eager to see what you put out next.
https://wrydeology.substack.com/
Obviously, there is a spectrum of cancel. If someone is a bit of a jerk, it's ok to still engage with their art, and it can often complicate the projections that I put on the piece. It doesn't bother me that someone like Mick Jagger may have been arrogant and difficult.
However, there is an amorphous line when it becomes impossible. Kanye West has lost me, for example. By going beyond "being a bit of a dick" into full-blown Nazism, it's just hard for me to listen to him without his anti-Semitic rhetoric being the first thing I think about.
Yes i agree on the spectrum of cancel and it’s not a straight up and down thing - it’s gonna be different every time.
I’m not really a Kanye fan to begin with but I do think he was a clever person for what he created etc. even though it’s not my thing. He seems really mentally unstable to me and it seems odd that he would be saying all of those things and truly mean them but who knows. It seemed like watching someone completely unravel and loose control but again it’s all personal right? If his words affect you then it’s gonna taint the work.
I feel the same about Britney Spears (she hasn’t done anything wrong) who as a child I grew up loving and now it seems she is also really unhinged and it’s horrible to watch. I find it emotional to see her in the early days and think of how I viewed her then and what she has been through and ended up as now.
I think it’s hard for public figures like that because we place so much on them by liking them and then also by hating them when they do wrong or fall victim to something or are reveled to be just plain old evil people.
Humans are so complicated. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here I appreciate it.
I think a lot of people sort of pity Kanye as he is clearly unwell and doesn’t seem in control of his behaviour. I guess that is why there doesn’t seem to be as much of an effort to cancel him as you’d expect. Also when someone is blatantly saying outrageous things openly it’s weirdly harder to cancel than to discover something done or said behind closed doors that gets exposed.
Great topic. Back when I was an English teacher one of the annoying things that would happen would be forcing student to buy the latest edition of "the Norton Anthology of English Literature" or the like. 90% of it would be the same as the previous edition (which could be had used for half the price) but 10% or so would be authors added or deleted. Ezra Pound is a good example even though he was an American. He was a Fascist collaborator in Italy. He was sort of "cancelled" in the sense that he doesn't show up in introductory anthologies but you can still take graduate classes on him. The idea being anyone should be able to read or study whatever they want but fewer and fewer are *required* to study him.
Yes I totally agree that we should be able to still learn about these people and their output, even if it’s less than ideal or plain evil. Burying things and canceling them doesn’t help society to move forward or understand the why behind the behaviour etc.
I am a big fan of the book Lolita which I think is written so beautifully as in the writing is lie nothing else I’ve ever read and he is very skilled but it’s topic is obviously extremely problematic. I feel I can’t say I like the book though for fear of being seen as a collaborator or someone who agrees with every aspect of the book.
Thanks for reading and interesting to know you were English teacher. Lux my partner was a teacher for many years too.
I think that part of the issue is when we put people on a pedestal and serve them up as being larger than life. There are some people who have had huge impacts on the arts of all types who simply are not great people. The issue then becomes whether their work is problematic vs whether they are problematic. As you note, there are no good answers to that. A great example, in addition to those already mentioned, is Tom Cruze who is generally considered a jerk by those I have talked to who knew him in one capacity or another. He has a huge body of very popular works, and he is generally a “good” actor but not one that people like to work with. Again, this comes from people I have talked to who have had interactions with him outside of Hollywood. Does this invalidate his work? I don’t know. Anyway, good topic to raise in these crazy times we live in.
The ethics of admiration, yes this seems to shape our public thought in recent years. I haven't arrived at many answers either but I'm loving this conversation.
For me , it's like the difference between Criminal Law and Civil Law. If someone commits a crime (e.g. he/she breaks the "criminal" law of the land) they get what they deserve and, in certain circumstances, I think society as a whole would find it hard to see them as ever having been rehabilitated. I'm thinking of individuals such as Epstein, Weinstein, Gary Glitter, etc. Some "artists" / celebrities seem to work on the basis that "all publicity is good publicity" and appear to court controversy as a way of keeping their profile in the public's line of sight. These are, I think the "grey area' to which you refer, Lucy. Thankfully, I seldom have to consider whether to cancel them or not cancel them as, for example, it would never occur to me to listen to "music" by Kanye West as (a) I'm not remotely into that musical genre and (b) his opinion on any subject is of as much interest to me as his "music". If he, or anyone else, oversteps the line and doesn't just offend the general public's sensibilities but actually breaks the law, then yes, "cancel" them in any way that the law prescribes as appropriate. Personally, I try not to sweat the petty stuff.