As the #metoo movement has made painfully clear, good artists (already an ambiguous category) don’t always make good people (another ambiguous category). But what happens to artistic creations when artists are outed as “bad people,” for various reasons? As readers and audiences, how are we to engage with their works, if at all, after finding out that their morality clearly does not align with ours? And is there a difference in how we approach this question when confronted with the works/persona of a dead artist vs. a living one who continues to benefit from our decision to read/watch their works? At the basis of these questions is a much thornier one about whether art must be moral and whether it needs to “teach” us how to be moral. Is it possible that art can have merit outside of morality? And if so, what might that merit be? To explore these questions, we will be looking at several works by and about “horrible people.” We will discuss how/whether to read jerks.
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