Separating the art from the artist: The blind spot of admiration

“It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated.”

Neruda is only one among many. Noam Chomsky, long considered the conscience of Western dissent, was later revealed to have ties with Jeffrey Epstein. Roman Polanski’s cinematic brilliance exists alongside charges of rape. Marlon Brando admitted that a rape scene in Last Tango in Paris was filmed without his co-actor’s consent. And Alice Munro, whose fiction is so precise about the moral failures of small-town lives, allegedly knew of her daughter’s continued sexual abuse at the hands of her then husband, and did nothing. Sometimes the crime is not violence, but silence.

Genius has an alibi

Caravaggio was a murderer. Picasso humiliated and abused the women who loved him.

These not-so-isolated scandals ask a larger, disquieting question: what does it say about us – as readers, as audiences, as societies – that we continue to celebrate such artists? Every award reissued, every retrospective screened, every quote shared online is also a quiet act of permission. We tell ourselves, genius redeems all, but it only reveals our capacity for selective blindness.

The argument for separating art from the artist rests on a seductive idea. That the work, once born, belongs to the world. Yet, art doesn’t exist in isolation; it carries traces of the hands that made it.

But what makes this reckoning more complicated is that almost every era’s art is riddled with these shadows. Caravaggio was a murderer. Picasso humiliated and abused the women who loved him. So did Hemingway, Dickens and Byron, to some degree. VS Naipaul boasted that no woman could ever be his equal in writing. Genius, we are reminded, has often been built on the bodies of those without power. Perhaps that is the oldest story of all; the world’s willingness to tolerate cruelty in exchange for beauty.

It’s tempting to explain some of this away as the morality of a different time and there is truth in that. Alice Munro existed in an era when silence around abuse was the social default, when women were expected to preserve dignity through denial. Many artists were shaped by worlds that excused what we now name and confront. But even with that context, what remains troubling is the dissonance and how easily some of them could see the pain of others on the page, yet fail to recognise it in life.

Understanding the time is not the same as forgiving it. Context may explain silence, but it does not absolve it. The point is not to measure past lives by today’s standards, but to notice how patterns of cruelty and complicity endure and how often brilliance has been used to justify them. It exposes the uneasy truth that art is not always born from integrity; sometimes it’s born despite its absence.

The reader’s reckoning

To reject their work outright might seem like moral clarity, but it risks simplifying something far more complex. To consume it uncritically, however, is complicity. The space between these extremes is where most of us now live – uneasy, alert, aware. Maybe the goal is not to erase, but to remember.

For me, the answer is simple: I cannot go back. I cannot read Neruda’s “Tonight I can write the saddest lines” without thinking of the woman who did not have a voice or choice. The knowing alters the experience; it sits between the reader and the text, the viewer and the screen. It changes the lens, and perhaps, that’s how it should be. Every rereading becomes a confrontation, not just with the text, but with the ethics of admiration itself.

So, the question is not whether art can survive its flawed makers. It already has. The question is whether we, as readers and viewers, can continue to look away and still claim to care about the world art seeks to illuminate. Art is meant to reveal the truth of being human but when the artist’s truth is one of exploitation or complicity, the revelation becomes unbearable.

In the end, separating the art from the artist may not be a clean split. It’s a fracture that runs through the reader’s heart, between awe and anger, love and loss. And maybe that fracture is where truth resides.

Perhaps the point, then, is not to separate the art from the artist, but to stop pretending that we can. Because once you’ve glimpsed the stain on the page, you can’t –and should not –unsee it.