If support of the art is in turn supporting the artist in hurting other people, there is no separation, just a lie we tell ourselves to avoid cognitive dissonance.

If the artist is dead, or otherwise unable to hurt people, then and only then is it possible to separate the two

Usually I'm not in the mood anymore after I get to know some artist is an asshole. It's not like I use my brain and deliberately try to reason about it. Or that I feel hatred towards the book/song now... But I never felt like re-reading Harry Potter after that. Or let Tidal play some artists' songs. The fun is just spoiled, I guess.

Case in point I use Piefed because the dev believes in democracy and human rights.

I think the link between the work and the artist is thin but unbreakable.

If you want to understand a literary work, you need to understand its context*. That context includes the author, but also when it was created, the original medium, the culture it's from… and the readers. Yup, people shape the work as they read it, and sometimes in ways that cancel out what the author said. But the voice of the author is still there. You can't simply ignore it; at most fight against it, and sometimes win.

Now, let's say the author is bad, but the work is good. Then it stops being just a literary matter, to become a moral one. It's all about weighting the harm caused by the author (and, as you said, subsidising that author and their problematic views) versus the benefit that the work itself would give to potential new readers. There isn't a single right answer that'll apply to all works, I think.

For example. Lovecraft was a racist piece of shit. But he kicked the bucket already, and his books are in public domain in most countries. So no matter how much you talk about his books, and how many readers pick them up, you aren't really financing a racist. So I guess it's fine? One might argue the racism leaks into the work, but remember what I said about readers being able to fight against the voice of the author?

Then there are cases like Harry Potter. We know JK Rowling is a bloody TERF. And if you buy her books, it's money being given to someone who will use it to promote her shitty views. One might say "just pirate them!", but plenty people won't pirate, and they'll know about the work because you talked about it. Then IMO it's getting into yucky territory, the odds you're causing harm by promoting that work are getting bigger, for a relatively small benefit people would get from the work itself.

Just my two cents.

*by "context", here, I mean everything around the text that shapes its meaning.

It's entirely possible to consume art without benefiting the artist. It's called piracy.

When my grandkids want to watch Harry Potter, JK Rowling doesn't get a penny from the act of me streaming it on an illegal site.

Yes and no

Yes insofar as the work really does stand alone - if it was suddenly revealed that Vincent van Gogh was a mass murderer, or a space alien, or a Labrador Retriever, or literally any other thing one might imagine, Starry Night would still look exactly the same.

And no insofar as I don't want my money going to a piece of shit, and to the degree that I can prevent that from happening, I do.

The art is not just the thing - it's impossible to experience it in isolation of it's context which you've constructed from your experiences and feelings and knowledge as well as how the art is situated and framed to you. This might be the point of the Fountain.

So I think it's impossible to separate the work for the artist if you have knowledge pertaining to them. Michael Jackson was an incredible talent, and his music is significant in my memories of my own childhood, but it hits different for me now. If we played his music to an alien freshly arrived from Mars they might think it's perfect, but it never can be again for us.

Sorta.

Art, or the more general "thing someone has made" that you're referring to, can be judged independently of the person. A terrible person can make beautiful music. Much of our cultural heritage was made by people who are rightfully considered to have problematic views, if for no other reason than they were more common then.

Then there's art as a commercial product. You can't separate the product from the manufacturer. There's no way to give someone you think is bad money that doesn't detract from your statement of disapproval.

Then there's crime and piracy. When it's media piracy I'm pretty ambivalent. Seems easier to just not consume stuff made by people you don't like, but I don't think it's "support" in the way that paying is.
When it's stealing actual physical things, that's just enjoying the good thing and actually costing them money, which is clearly not supporting anyone. That just kinda makes it funny.
At the extreme end is stuff like "that's our confederate flag. We got it when we shot a bunch of confederates and took their flag". Clearly not supportive.

Not while they're alive certainly, and maybe not ever.

Depends.

Is the artist dead? Then sure.

Will they benefit in any way from my support of their work?

Then no.

Did I pay for it before I found out that they were X, Y, or Z?

Then enjoy it, or don't, just don't give them more money.

Yeah, I've got most of Gaiman's books. I still think his collab with Pratchet was brilliant. But he'll never get another cent from me. Roman Polanski? I pirate his shit, he and his estate will never see my money.

It's hard as fuck these days.

Minecraft and Notch?

Young Kanye vs Nazi Ye?

American Gods and Neil Gaiman?

Harry Potter and TERF Queen?

The hard part is defining the lines.

Is Louie CK as bad as Cosby?

People apologizing for PewDiePie's Nazi shit when he was a kid?

I fucking just heard that Andy Weir has some problematic views.

If the artist is still alive, then generally no. I don’t support any anti-trans artists because their beliefs and sometimes actions harm me and people I care about. It would be hypocritical and privileged of me to not apply that to artists that harm groups I’m not in.

If the artist is dead however, I’m a bit more flexible. A vast amount of historical artists were sexist or racist or bigoted in some way by modern standards. Not to mention the art the created may be constrained by the norms of the time as well. It would be extremely difficult to find a historical artist without something to take issue with and they’re not actively harming anyone anymore.

Its a ridiculous concept, "you have to separate the art from the artist," no we don't, in fact it is actively harmful when we do. You know who never says to separate the art from the artist? The artist. And if that artist harmed people, their victims and families aren't gonna be separating the art from the artist either.

Taking of for granted that people should separate the producer from the product -- gee, where have I heard this before? "Oh, you see, you have to look at things in this narrow way that makes no sense" nobody has to do that. All power and value in society is just people doing stuff, the value of the art is created by the time and energy of the artist, the galleries, the socialites, the critics, etc., thinking of art as just some commodity is atrocious, not to mention, the artists time and expertise is in the art.

No piece of art is known by the people who owned it, inly the artist. Like sometimes theres a "collector" that donates or showcases their collection and you hear about those people. But most of the time, most people, don't give a shit who owned the thing.

Finally, think about it the other way. Would anyone ever "separate the art from the artist" when going to sell it? Picasso produced an immense amount of work, few people could tell the difference between a Picasso and like just a bunch of shapes on a page, arranged a certain way, if they had never seen either one before. Some people might prefer the shapes over the Picasso. So if someone found a Picasso in their grandmas attic, and grandma needed a new Cadillac, would they ever try to not sell the work as a Picasso? Like believing the art itself would stand on its own and grandma would get just as much money marketing the artist as unknown rather than marketing it as a genuine Picasso.

The only time people tell you to separate the producer from the product is when they're fucking you over. I think people just hear it and don't wanna sound like a shitty person for liking Ted Nugent, and so they repeat it. It sounds smart I guess, it often makes people at least pause on it, but in reality bit makes no sense whatsoever, and we don't have to mystify it or acknowledge the view as legitimate.

Mixed feelings. I don't like supporting horrible people but at the same time I simply cannot background check every artist/actor.

If you can't, you have failed the critical thinking test.

Not while they're alive. If they're long gone, we can talk about it.

Lindsay Ellis has a nice video about this

Yes, I'm very "death of the artist". But to me, that mostly means that the artist doesn't get any more say in what a finished piece of art means than anybody else.

If I like a piece of art, but not the artist that made it, that's not a contradiction to me. Bad people can still make great art. Take Ace of Base: I'm never going to give them money, but I still listen to "Cruel Summer". This is a song that is definitely not promoting White Supremacy.

I don't have time to vet everyone whose work I enjoy. Another issue I have is that if I've enjoyed someone's work for years, and it's become dear to me, am I supposed to just turn that enjoyment off if it turns out they're problematic?

no. ian watkins music should burn with him

It depends. What’s the context? What’s the purpose or goal?

If the goal is to evaluate technical merit or the chemical composition or the audio waves or the pixels, then the artist may be trivial.

If the goal is to establish chains of causality, bolster or undermine moral stances, or simply understand the context of a piece of work, then the artist is central.

Context and purpose are crucial.

Yes, because I can't possibly keep investigating the moral compass of every artist out there.

I view art as an open communication of sorts. It can be viewed without knowledge of the person behind it, but in general the more you expose yourself to a person, the better you get to know them. Their styles, values, thought patterns, all of which get baked into the art in a fundamental level.

For that reason, I don't really think you can. You can look at their works from how you engage with them, absolutely, but you can't fully disengage yourself with the idea that someone alive made this. It dehumanises creators, turning them into content machines. You may as well get an AI to start churning out garbage.

I do.

Some of the works I admire the most have been written (or painted, or composed,...) by people I don't like, to say the least.

Humans are complex beings.
Culture, social norms (good vs bad) and historical background (what was considered legal and illegal) are also very complex. And the can be very different from one region to the next, and even in the same region from one time period to the next.

While, on the other hand, the action of judging someone else (or some past time) is often lazy as fuck, based on nothing but personal emotions (hate, anger, sadness,... or their exact opposite), distaste (I don't like to see/hear/taste this or that) and preconceptions (I think people should (not) be allowed to do this or that).

You don't believe me? Well, you're absolutely right to not believe anyone, me included, but then just go ask a few racists out there how easy it is to judge (and to hate on) someone based on their race or skin color, or even on their culture and social norms being different from ours... Do we really want to act like racists? I certainly don't, even when it's for other reasons than race, even for 'moral' reasons. Which, btw, is in itself a very changing notion.

I also think no one, me included, is perfect. So, how come should I be allowed to judge and to condemn anyone based on their own imperfections and faults?

Judging should be the job of the judges: people that been educated to fairly be judging (aka by accepting as a fact that anyone accused of anything should be considered innocent until proven otherwise) people's actions based on a set of arbitrary rules (that is the law) and when deemed necessary by punishing anyone that has not respected said rules. Judging should not be my job as an individual, filled with my own emotions and personal biases, nor as a citizen with my own set of values, and it is even less so as an amateur of art (no matter how deeply I may (dis)like some artists).

This might be a controversial take, but yes. In the creative world it's a conversation but there are a multitude of other domains where no one seems to care. IBM made proto-computers for the nazis to keep track of concentration camp prisoners. Volkswagen was created by Hitler. Continuing the nazi theme there are a lot of medical technologies that were made possible by (often) lethal experimentation on prisoners. Just about every publicly traded company is evil to some degree.

When it comes to the creative world we care for some reason. If it bothers you buy the media second hand. The creator gets $0 if you do. Sure it technically supports the secondary market which effects the new purchases because it makes reselling a viable option, but if you're tracking things that far removed from you there is pretty much nothing you can ethically buy. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

It depends on what the art is, and what the artist has done. I've done both sides of this issue and will probably keep doing so.

Neither I guess? I hate the expression "separating the work from the artist". It assumes that you can only completely ignore the context or reduce everything to the context. Humans are capable of more than that. You don't even have to actively decide how much you value the context and whether or not you are comfortable with a piece of art. It'll happen automatically.

Regarding not giving support to an artist whose views you strongly oppose, then it's about the product and not the work. There's a huge difference between opposing the power an artist gains from their product and opposing the art itself.

Somewhat, financially supporting the work of active assholes like JKR or Disney I consider a wrong. If copyright were still 5 years as originally conceived I'd say wait and have at it once it enters public domain, but unfortunately that's no longer an option while retaining cultural relevance in most cases. So yo ho ho I guess.

Another consideration is freedom of speech (or expression), which I support in pretty absolute terms, barring yelling fire in a theater and other exceptions which cause direct harm. An interesting one being 'inciting hatred', which IMO should not be an exception to freedom of speech because the brush is too broad and can be used to silence too much depending on who wields it, especially when applied to art.

Which brings us to the issue of tolerating the intolerant, to which I say we need to foster a society in which intolerance is not accepted, therefore do not tolerate intolerance. If the art is intolerant, say Mein Kampf, the solution is not to ban it, but to do the work to engender a societal hatred (or better a disgust) of Nazis, an active intolerance of intolerance (something the world has dropped the ball on, and we're paying for it).

Separation of art and artist is a complicated question with plenty of meat on the bones. At the end of the day, personally, I still consider Harry Potter a fun, fairly mindless romp (with some questionable themes) which I enjoyed as it came out, but JKR's behavior has certainly put a damper on it for me. I would probably no longer recommend it to a child even to foster reading, it's had its moment and there's better options, say 'A Wrinkle in Time'.

I saw Sleeper as a yout and thought it was funny before I knew anything about Woody Allen as a person. I was old enough to rent that VHS, or however I watched it, but I certainly didn't mean to endorse him. To be fair, I haven't watched it again since.

ETA: This isn't some stance I've taken. This is just an anecdote about how I saw a movie both directed by and starring a person who some may find objectionable. For me at that young age, there was only the art because I was not aware of the artist so there was no "separating" to do. I'm not making any suggestions about what others should do.

I don't think supporting the work really needs to be supporting the artist. I think some folks conflate the 2 and really don't separate it. My personal take is, you can like something like a song or a painting, but that shouldn't mean you then buy the CD or merch. I think once you do that, only at that point are you really supporting both.

You can’t really. For instance Warren Ellis’s (comics version) work is suffused with his self-image as a cantankerous libertine rebel who will speak truth to power but who is fatally blind to his own abuses of power, so it makes reading it pretty ick now given he has apparently no interest in addressing that.