Tempestuous Teapottery –
Should an artist’s flaws count against the art? Should an image, a grotesque caricature really, of HPL be dumped because the man himself was a racist?
Is hate by association sufficient? Ask the same of Nazi documentariste Leni Reifenstahl and her otherwise superb films. We are currently in a time when certain views are deal-breakers. At other times we might celebrate how HPL rose above his petty bigotries. We might separate Riefenstahl’s politics from her technical achievements. Now we condemn and distance. Expunge. Now is a time of selective zero tolerance.
Having said all this I will also say that this whole thing about HPL’s prejudice has been blown out of any rational proportion. It does not overtly inform or deform his work, which is what counts. Or should. Dumpling the Howie to avoid offending a few is a sad, shallow, empty decision. It only lessens the award.
In a corporate sense it’s a good move in order to remove an irrelevant distraction. Branding demands it.
As to the statuette being bad art, well, on those grounds one might have a case in support of replacing it.
It’s really about blurring any distinction between art and artist. If the art itself is not objectionable, should it matter that the artist is? Do not roses grow in manure?
Anyway, none of this matters when the nature of awards itself is of dubious worth anyway.
Yes, it’s fun to be affirmed and acknowledged, yes, and superficially, temporarily gratifying, perhaps in a vague way validating — sales and continuing popularity being far better gauges than critical bleats and blats — but awards are really about self-congratulatory back-slaps and setting up the givers of
awards as arbiters of taste and quality. It’s a charade of some kind. It’s a subjective power move and it boils down to more politics in our over-politicized lives.
So do what you think you must. Stop using money because of whose face is on it. Boycott based on the flaw you can always find in any individual rather than focusing on the good or harm, the quality or its lack, of what ever that person or that person’s company produces.
Just don’t ask anyone to think it’s righteous or important.
The work is what counts. Only the work matters in the end.
/ geste
