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Mary Beth Willard, "Why It's Ok to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists" (Routledge, 2021)
01:08:14
An interview with Mary Beth Willard
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- [00:04]
Mary Beth Willard
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more at WhatsApp.com mutine adjective used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained, one who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions. They know the rules, but behave as if they do not exist. The new fragrance by Miu Miu defined.
- [00:58]
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- [01:22]
Mary Beth Willard
There welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:30]
Alison Lee
Hello everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Art, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Alison Lee, one of the co hosts of the channel and associate professor of art history at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Today I'm excited to be interviewing Mary Beth Willard about her new book, why it's okay to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists, which was published by Routledge in 20. Dr. Willard is an associate professor of philosophy at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University and writes primarily on metaphysics and aesthetics. She teaches courses on deductive logic, metaphysics and existentialism, and she writes regularly for Aesthetics for Birds, a group blog of philosophers of aesthetics and art. Her first book, why it's okay to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists, which we'll be discussing today, considers what we should do when we learn that an artist has acted immorally. One might argue that we ought to turn away from these works, but according to Dr. Willard, it's hard to find good reasons to do so. She claims that because most boycotts of artists won't succeed, there's no ethical reason to do so most of the time. She then contends that canceling artists is ethically risky because it encourages moral grandstanding. This is quite a provocative little volume, and I hope you enjoy our conversation about it today. Mary Beth Willard, welcome to the show.
- [03:11]
Mary Beth Willard
Hi, Alison, thank you so much for having me on.
- [03:14]
Alison Lee
Absolutely. Thanks for taking the time out of your day. Well, I wonder if you might begin. I always begin these interviews by asking you to tell. Tell us a little bit about yourself. So where are you from originally? Maybe how did you become interested in philosophy, which we could probably have an entire hour long conversation about. Tell us about any mentors you had in graduate school or along the way. Just kind of give us some of your background, if you would.
- [03:40]
Mary Beth Willard
Oh, goodness, where to start? Okay, so I feel like when you ask academics this, they always tend to give a list of like where they've been at academic institutions, right?
- [03:49]
Alison Lee
That's true.
- [03:49]
Mary Beth Willard
Yeah. I grew up outside of Pittsburgh in a suburb south of the city. And when I went to college, I was a very enterprising prospective chemistry major actually. And the university I went to, Notre Dame, had a philosophy requirement and a freshman seminar requirement. And I thought, two birds with one stone, I'll get this humanities nonsense out. And I took a class with Mark Jordan. It was on ancient philosophy, which I'd never studied before, and it was on the pre Socratics of all things. So here I am, you know, 18, reading Heraclitus and trying to figure out what the heck is going on with all of this. And I was totally hooked. And I feel like the next part of the story should be. And I changed my major to philosophy right away and I knew what I wanted to do, but that's not actually true. I stayed as like a biochem major for another three semesters and then realized I hated lab. And, and at that point I'm like, well, I'd taken another philosophy class and I'd done pretty well in that because there was a two philosophy requirement. And then I changed my major and I ended up with a double major in philosophy and what they called computer applications, which I think was an attempt to make sure liberal arts people could get hired today. We'd probably call it data science. And I had no plans for grad school. I was going to go and get a job. And then about a year into actually having a job, I'm kind of like, I miss this philosophy stuff. So I took the GRE and then applied to grad school. So it's kind of like I stumbled forward into ending up as a philosopher. I feel like a lot of people, like, they knew they wanted to do this and I'm sort of like, eh, we'll see if it works out. And it kind of Did, Yeah. So I did my PhD at Yale, as you told everybody already. And there I worked mostly with Michael Delarocca, which might sound a little strange because he obviously focuses on Spinoza and early modern philosophers, which means I know way too much, much about the early moderns or anybody who actually does like contemporary aesthetics, but it's okay. But he was a very good mentor in terms of, like, just encouraging ideas and being a really good person to work with. And my dissertation involved a little bit of philosophy of language and a little bit of metaphysics, because I was interested in the metaphysics of how we think about fictional characters. Like, what does it mean to have sentences about Sherlock Holmes be true even though he doesn't exist? How do you think of a character as a work in progress? And so, yeah, I've always had one foot in metaphysics and one foot in aesthetics. But the story of this book starts quite a bit later because I wasn't thinking about ethics or immoral art really into 2017. And we can talk about that if you want. Beyond that. Yeah. I graduated during the great financial crisis and this little university that I'd never heard of in Utah. I didn't even know that, like, there was a mountain on the campus. And there is. I'm told that when I was here on my fly out, like, the look on my face was pretty funny because I flew in at night. My flight was really delayed, and it was super cloudy, and I got up in the morning and it was still cloudy, and I went to campus, did my teaching demo, met with the dean, walked outside at lunch and went, there's a mountain on this campus. Because it was the first time I'd realized anywhere about, like, where I was, it was just all airports and campuses. But, yeah, I've been here 11 years now and started skiing. So I think I'm stuck because I don't think my kids will move anywhere that there isn't a ski Resort within 25 minutes of the house. So feel pretty lucky overall.
- [07:26]
Alison Lee
Well, you already kind of set up my next question perfectly. I, you know, always want to ask, or I like to ask, how books come about. I think it's a fascinating topic. In your case, I actually wanted to ask, not only did you, like, how did you come to write this particular book on this particular subject, especially given the background that you just described, but I'm particularly interested in whether this was commissioned. I know it's part of this Routledge series that, you know, that is a whole bunch of topics, why it's okay to all sorts of Various things or have you pitched it or volunteered to write it? Kind of two pronged question about how it came about.
- [08:02]
Mary Beth Willard
Good. So I'll start with where the subject starts about, and then I'll tell you how the book contract happened. And both of them, I think, are a little bit strange. So the interest in immoral artists for me started at the the American Society for Aesthetics annual meeting in New Orleans in November of 2017. And this was right when all of the MeToo stuff was really breaking. So everything in the News is about Harvey Weinstein, and it's about all these other actors and celebrities who are getting caught up in the MeToo movement. And Alex King, who runs Aesthetics for Birds, was talking with Justin Weinberg, who runs Daily News, so the two big philosophy blogs. And she was saying like, hey, we want to do a crossover thing about this immoral artist and aesthetics or artwork and stuff. And we're hanging out in the ballroom after one of the talks. She's like, do you want to write this? And she was talking to me and Matt Stroll, and we said, yeah, we think we actually have an interesting take on it because everybody's talking about how we have to cancel these guys. And we kind of wanted to stand up for aesthetic value and the aesthetic life. So we jointly wrote this blog post. And it was a really. I just remember because it was such a fun weekend. We were running around New Orleans eating all of the things. So it's like, let's go for beignets and coffee and like, writing on a laptop. And Matt is editing and freaking out about, like, whether we're going to get canceled. And I'm like, let's just go for it. And like, then going back in and taking all the snarky jokes anyhow, we end up with this little thing. It hits Daily News, it gets linked around a little bit. And then a couple years later we're asked to write a follow up on it. And we do that. And then here's what happens as far as. So that's the interest of the story. And if you actually look at like the second piece we wrote, it's almost an outline of the book that comes out of it. I went back and was looking at it. I'm like, wow, I really did have this whole thing kind of in mind, except for the sixth chapter when I was first thinking about it. But how the book actually came about was the Eastern APA in Vancouver. So this was 2019. And I actually didn't go. And I'm telling this because I think this is a really good story about how somebody can be an ally. And Matt was at the reception with all of the book editors and things like that, where they go around and people are pitching ideas. And he said, hey, I have the text message from it. Janet just says, yo. I met with the Rutledge editor running their series why it's okay to short books meant for a crossover audience. He was trying to agree to write a different book. And he said, I suggested for you why it's okay to listen to Michael Jackson. The editor got in touch with me a couple days later and said, do you want to submit a pitch? The first version of the book is actually just very narrowly focused on Michael Jackson because the Leaving Neverland documentary had just come out. And the idea of there's so many think pieces and journalistic hot takes about can we listen to Michael Jackson? Or I think my favorite thing, like, can we listen to Michael Jackson? But, like, only to his early career before he started abusing people. Like, is that the way that we can draw the line? And I think there's a really interesting question here. So, yeah, I kind of had a project tossed in my direction a little bit, and I was interested in it. The first. The first pitch and the first draft of the book was a lot more focused on Michael Jackson. After I wrote the first draft, I emailed Andrew and I said, I need to expand this. I can't have it just be about Michael Jackson because he's a really easy case. He's crazily rich. He's also dead. And that takes away a lot of the interesting ethical questions about what we can do to change things as consumers or how we can respond. So the book expanded a little bit and focused on different artists, different questions. It completely got rewritten. The sixth chapter was originally a very punchy, like, teaching oriented summary of the entire book. It was the kind of thing. It was like, you know, how to assign this to a class in 8,000 words. And I cut the chapter because after I changed the focus, it seemed a little repetitive. And so then the last chapter ended up being about aesthetic value and projects and how having an aesthetic project can make us think about new avenues of responding to somebody ethically. Right. By using our artwork to criticize somebody, for example, or talking in communities of people about, like, what do you do about Woody Allen and that kind of thing. So, yeah, that's kind of how the book happened. So it is part of the series. And the series pitch, I think, for Andrew was a little bit more. I think. I mean, the original pitch was Something like everyday people's views are finally defended by philosophers. Right. So, like, interesting questions and ethics and aesthetics that you don't expect to get taken up by mainstream philosophy. But we. There wasn't really a whole lot of editorial oversight in terms of what we actually wrote. So my book is why it's okay to enjoy the work of immoral artists. But it's kind of a take where I'm like, most of the time it's okay, but, you know, don't be a jerk. And really what I want to do is encourage some reflection. So it's a very, you know, moderate take. Matt did a similar thing. His book is why it's okay to love bad movies. And it's really like this, you know, aesthetic love note of like, why bad Hollywood movies are this source of creativity and expression that you won't find elsewhere. So I think we kind of ran away with the titles a little bit, but it was a lot of fun to write.
- [13:45]
Alison Lee
Well, I want to ask you several follow up questions. I think this is perfect. You've set up nicely a lot of the things that I want to kind of dig into about the book, about the title, about the artists that you cover in this book. But you referred to the sixth chapter getting kind of added at the end. And, you know, for those who are listening, who are interested maybe in the process of how books get written, it is very interesting how things shift, or as. As Mary Beth is saying, you know, you begin with something that's just maybe a short essay and then you realize you've hit on something that maybe can be much longer. But let me give our listeners a little bit of a sense of the six chapters in the book and the topics that you kind of COVID and the punchiness of these titles in and of themselves. So Mary Beth has already hinted there are six chapters in this book total. The first one is called Sorry, no easy answers here. The second one is why artists probably won't notice your boycott. The third one is Epistemic injustice Jerks boycotts and you. The fourth is when the art. Art just won't separate from the artist. The fifth is cancel everything. And then in parentheses, we should probably set Twitter on fire just to be safe. And then the last one, the sixth is Aesthetic Lives as ethical lives. So I want to kind of work through this book, but before I do that, I want to begin maybe finally asking you a question about the book proper now. And it's a silly question to ask because I know the answer having read the book, but I think it'll get us a good amount of the way into what you do here if I ask it anyway and you just kind of bat it around a little bit and then we can dive into some particulars. The question is, do you, Mary Beth, really think it's okay to enjoy the work of immoral artists most of the.
- [15:45]
Mary Beth Willard
Time in most contexts? Yes.
- [15:47]
Alison Lee
Yeah. Okay. So having set that up, and Mary Beth does say that towards the beginning of the book, and she. I think you say something right afterwards. Like, I know this might be a shocking answer, but, you know, let me explain and take you through all the reasons why I believe this, this to be true. Now, when you answer my question about how the book came about a little bit, you referred to the title. And I'm. I'm sorry, I'm intrigued by this title not only because it's part of this series and there are, you know, a bunch of these books to enjoy that, like you said, are written for a popular audience in a way that's very manageable. They're very digestible. They're not super long books. You know, I read this in a couple of days on a series of flights, actually, which is. It's quite nice to, you know, take a slim volume with you on a trip and be able to say you finished it when you got home. But one of the things that I was so struck by from getting the book and all the way to now having finished it was the enjoy in the title. And as I was reading it, I kept kind of waiting for you to address this idea of enjoyment or maybe kind of define what you mean by it in the context of the artworks you discuss. But you never. You don't quite go there. You get very close a couple of times. But I just kept thinking, is this about enjoying? Because you talk, and everyone just heard me say in the chapter titles, you talk so much about boycotting and censoring and canceling immoral artists. So I kind of wondered, you know, you had to make it fit within the series title, why it's okay. But I wondered about, like, possible other titles maybe. Did you think about calling it why it's okay to Engage with the Work of Immoral Artists or was it always Enjoyed?
- [17:33]
Mary Beth Willard
So the title came about very late. So, remember, initially it was why it's okay to listen to Michael Jackson. And that was. That was going to be the title. They thought it would be really catchy. And so then once I decided I wasn't really interested in writing that much about Michael Jackson and that the editor was okay with it. It kind of went without a title for a little bit. And it was one of the assistants that suggested when I'm like, I don't know what we're going to call this thing, he's like, how about why it's okay to enjoy the work of immortal artists? And at that point, I was just like, sure, let's go with that. To your question, though, I think engage is probably more accurate, right? Sometimes it is enjoyment, right? And if you're thinking about something like Michael Jackson, I mean, Michael Jackson's dance music, right? You're supposed to, you know, do the little zombie arms to a thriller, and you're supposed to, you know, try to moonwalk and all of the things that we do with that. It's dance music. It's supposed to be fun. But I think sometimes it's just engagement, right? And that could be contemplation, that could be, you know, appreciation. That could be sharing, that could be making other aesthetic decisions. I'm really interested in how aesthetics isn't just like the kind of caricature of the solitary person listening with headphones or watching something by themselves. I mean, I obviously can't speak for anybody, but I think most of us enjoy art or engage with art often in the community of others, right? So I think one of the really important considerations that I try to address in the book is that it's not just a decision to listen to R. Kelly, for example. It's a decision to play R. Kelly at a campus dance, right? And those are two very different questions. So engage is probably closer to the spirit of a lot of what I'm talking about. But I think it's often really bound up with enjoyment because that's why we're into art and other aesthetic practices in the first place. They're fun, right? They bring people together. They allow us to express our ideas and our individuality and create a lot of the time, right? There's often a lot of focus on passive consumption of art. And I didn't get into this quite in the amount that I wanted to in the book. But one of the issues for me is often thinking about what do people do with the art that they love, right? They write fan fiction, they draw fan art. They share it with friends. They undertake all of these activities that don't really fit with the sort of passive model of, like, I read the book and I enjoyed it. It's more like, I read the book and I was inspired to try to write my own story. Or I remember a couple of years ago, it was the first season, when Game of Thrones came out, a friend of mine and I would get together every week and we'd watch the show. And for the finale of the first season, we decided because somebody on the Internet had posted like a recipe for one of the main characters favorite desserts. So it's like we had way too much beer and we are going to make lemon cakes and watch the finale of Game of Thrones. And that's kind of a way of engaging with the show, right? It's bringing people together. It's, you know, pursuing creativity in the kitchen. I don't think the beer fits in here at all. But you get the idea that this is not just. It's not just passive contemplation. And I think that that's one factor that I think is really important in thinking about how we engage with the art of immoral artists.
- [20:55]
Alison Lee
Yeah, well, I'm glad to hear you say a lot of that because I think so often what you. It strikes me as an art historian that you're discussing or describing is engagement or appreciation. And there, like you just said, there are definitely instances where it passes through to another level that is definitely enjoyment. But I. I was struck by that as I was reading it, and I'm probably going to continue thinking about it. The other element of the title that I started to wonder about probably about halfway through the book was Artists. And maybe again, this is me speaking as an art historian. I can't help but be what I am and bring the background that I do, just like you bring the philosophical background that you do. And I started to wonder, well, maybe this book should have entitled why it's okay to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Men. Because. Because so many of the cases that you put forward are, well, they're all men for the most part, and it's questionable. And you even refer to this a couple of times, their status as artists. So the main cases that you focus on in the book, though there are certainly others beyond this list, are, as you just said, Michael Jackson looms large. Harvey Weinstein makes several appearances. Bill Cosby has kind of a chapter devoted to him. Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K. r. Kelly. And then there's a little bit kind of heavy in the last chapter on Paul Gauguin, who, you know, is probably the most artisty of the artists that you name. And I wondered, like, and I think you say this are comedians, you know, like Louis CK Artists. Can we think of Harvey Weinstein as a producer of films, as an artist? And I kind of, you know, what I was expecting the book to be, or what I was hoping it to be, because I wanted it to be about artists like Gauguin. It wasn't quite that. So was there any contemplation, as it morphed from the Michael Jackson project to this, about calling these guys artists?
- [22:59]
Mary Beth Willard
So I wanted to be as inclusive as possible with the word art. And part of that is. Part of it is because the questions that people have been interested in since 2017 and the specific focus on the MeToo movement are cases where the artists in question are entertainers. Right. Weinstein's an interesting case, because I don't remember if this story made it into the book or not, but one of the questions was, how do you feel about movies that he produced? And for me, I'm like, I don't care that he produced them. The producer credit is not something that really influences my interpretation of the artwork. And so one of the stories, again, I honestly don't remember whether this made it into the book, was that I was talking with the editor about the cases I'm using, and I mentioned Good Will Hunting, which is produced by Weinstein, and his first response was, what did Matt Damon do? And I'm like, matt Damon didn't do anything. But that's really interesting because your question was. Or the issue is the producer, right? And he gets a lot of money from this. But the artist is Damon. Right? The face of the production is the actor. And so writers, producers, I don't know, cameramen, you know, grips. I don't know what goes into movies. But those guys are part of making art. But they're kind of not the face of the problem. Right, okay. Back to where I was going with this is that I was thinking that when we're Talking about the MeToo movement, we are talking pretty broadly about Hollywood. We're talking about celebrity culture. And that's mixed in with this. The other reason that I didn't focus on the classic fine arts is that I think a lot of the questions, Gauguin aside, because there's been a lot of discussion in museum and curation and artistic circles about what to do with his legacy. A lot of times it's almost more like interesting trivia. Caravaggio is a bad guy. He probably murdered a pimp and then, you know, had to flee to another city. And, you know, murder is pretty bad, but nobody cares about that at all. Right? It's like almost an interesting historical thing, like what these crazy Renaissance guys got up to, rather than a call for action. So I think the focus In a lot of art being, or rather the Me Too movement being on present day entertainers, where we feel like we have a connection to them, where we feel like there's something we could possibly do. And I was really interested in the idea that we tend to think of this in the language of, like, being an ethical consumer. Right. The nearest analogy is that the other reason I didn't want to. I focused on the more pop culture stuff is that I didn't want to be a gatekeeper with respect to what counts as art. Because at least in philosophy, you know, there's a lot. A lot of ink spilled over whether something's art, what makes something art, is there's an institutional theory of art or a cluster theory of art. And I just wanted to say, like, sometimes I think it's just you're basically saying this is worth preserving or worth attending to aesthetically. And I'm not comfortable saying, well, you know, okay, comedians aren't really artists. I'm like, well, we still have the question about what to do about all of Bill Cosby's back catalog. I think you could make a case though, that jokes can count as, like, miniature little art forms. Right? There's a regularity to them, a pattern. There's a rule of three. You can make sense of it that way. But I think, I mean, the decision for the book was also to keep it very accessible. And when I talk to people about, like, I'm writing a book about immoral artists, people asked me about Michael Jackson, they asked me about Cosby, they asked me about headlines, they asked me about, like, whether we should cancel people and. And not so much about Gauguin, Although I think Gauguin himself is also really interesting for a variety of reasons.
- [26:57]
Alison Lee
Yeah, definitely. And I guess this goes to, you know, who you're talking to and who you ask if you depend on. If you'd said you were working on this book in my circle, you know, Caravaggio, Les you just named in Gauguin, a couple of others would have. Would have loomed large. I want to ask you about something that I was struck by right away in the very first chapter, the. Sorry, no easy answers here. These great sort of punchy chapter titles that get a good amount into what you do in each one. But I was struck right away here by what I perceive to be certain kind of assumptions that you make that then end up perpetuating over the course of the book. So in this first chapter, you claim that in the cases at the center of the MeToo movement, the content of the art is set to one side and that the ethical problem with the artworks that you discuss really isn't driven by what they're portraying or what they endorse, but arises, as you say, from the fact that an immoral person made the art. And I immediately went, is that true? And I guess I just. What I want to ask is why were you so committed to kind of sidestepping the fact that there are a lot of cases where the immoral artist's outlook and their behavior is fundamentally embedded in the work itself? The work that, as the title of the book says, we are enjoying and that you're arguing we should be be fine with enjoying.
- [28:31]
Mary Beth Willard
Good. So there's a couple of questions, one sort of strategic and one sort of content wise. So within philosophy, there's been a decent amount of work done on the problem of immoral content in work. Right. James Herold has a book called Dangerous Art, came out in 2020. About. And that book is a very broad overview of, like, lots of ways that art can be immoral. Right? So it could be immoral in terms of its production, it could be immoral in terms of what it's expressing or in terms of, like, what it does to people or any number of reasons. And so one thing I wanted to do when, and the reason I framed it this way is that I think in a lot of cases, and specifically the cases that the MeToo movement are about, not too many people were thinking that there was a problem with, say, Michael Jackson's songs or his lyrics. Right. Like, none of those seem to be about the sexual assault of children. Right. Most of the jokes for Cosby, for example, very family friendly, very wholesome, very working in a tradition of, like, American fatherhood and all sorts of, you know, presumably wholesome things like that. The question is really about whether they're behavior means that we can still enjoy their work. Right. And as I argue in the, in the Cosby chapter, I do think that there, there is a case to say that how they behave sometimes influences how we interpret their work. But what I didn't want was to take cases where, like, the artwork itself, you know, is thought to be morally offensive or something like that. And I think that's kind of interesting. And the reason I think that it's interesting is that I feel like philosophy kind of knows what to say about the cases where the artwork is immoral. I mean, people don't always agree, right? But you can say, oh, well, it's expressing an immoral attitude or it's, you know, glorifying something that, you know, shouldn't be praised or it's, you know, leads to harm, or it's an aesthetic flaw, right? If you have to imagine that infanticide is good, then you're going to not be able to engage with the fiction properly. So you have this really rich literature about morality within fiction and how it makes us think. But the artist, like, classically, you just say, oh, well, that's the artist's personal life, right? That has nothing to do with how we think about their artwork, right? That's, you know, separate the art from the artist is the first slogan that you kind of have to go up against. And thinking about it, when I was writing the book, I'm like, well, these are cases where, like, sometimes we reevaluate the work, right? Claire Daederer has this wonderful aside in her piece on Woody Allen, for example, where he says, you know, this man is known. I'm paraphrasing here, for his sensitivity to moral ambiguity in everything, except for basically whether it's okay for him to date teenagers, right? And once you realize that, like, for me, I'm like, yeah, I'm done. Like, I can't handle it anymore, right? So I don't want to preclude the possibility of looking at their life and then using it to reevaluate their work. What I want to say, though, is that most of the time, people, when they watched Woody Allen films, weren't really struck by that, right? Lots of people really love Woody Allen, and they don't think, like, man, it's really creepy that he's always with a much beautiful younger woman. You take that as just kind of part of how you make movies in the 70s and 80s, and then you can reinterpret it. So what I wanted to say, too, is that, I mean, for something like Cosby, right, You could think that if I just showed you the Cosby show, right, and you didn't know anything about him or the recordings of his standup that my parents had on vinyl, which I listened so much to as a kid, none of that suggests anything, right? None of what he did is justified by that. And I think that's different from Louis CK But I still think that there's something interesting to say there, right? So you can't just say, like, well, the art stands by itself. I'm like, well, except that it kind of doesn't, right? Because we do care about this, right? And so maybe we're all making a mistake. But as I argue, I don't think we are. I think you can look at what the artist is doing and reinterpret the work. And I think sometimes the work comes out worse for that. I've been following lately people who are criticizing J.K. rowling for her recent stance on transgender individuals and her unfortunate tendency to fan the flames on Twitter, I'd say, but a lot of people are going back and looking at the books and specifically like, the way she understands, like, justice and morality within Hogwarts and being like, man, she was never good about difference or she was never great about this, or, you know, the things that we thought we read into the books we were reading into and maybe, you know, this was never there all along. How many of her bad guys look like, you know, caricatures of, you know, medieval ideas of goblins and things like that, Right? So you can, I think, revisit an author's work or an artist's work in light of what, you know, know about them. But I also think that they are distinct questions. And I think that, I mean, it would be really easy if we could say, look, this person made immoral art. Anyway, I already had reason to reject it. But I think the hard cases and the ones that are really philosophically interesting are the ones where the art seems like it's still okay, right? But we know that the person who made it was bad in a significantly moral sense.
- [34:20]
Alison Lee
In that sense, it seemed like the last chapter where you do talk about Paul Gauguin, who I think is a great example of an artist where his behavior in terms of, as you talk about leaving his wife behind in Europe, his five children in order to marry 13 and 14 year old girls in Tahiti and paint them nude. And these are the works that are so often up in museums. He's a really good case where the content of the works is a clear indicator of the immoral behavior. And it's hard to unstick the two. And the enjoyment, I guess, becomes questionable in that case.
- [35:03]
Mary Beth Willard
I mean, Gauguin is a really tough case, right? I mean, and I think it's why Gauguin is always the case, right? Other artists, you know, like Eric Gill, for example, horrible, horrible things that he did doesn't seem to affect a sculpture, but Gauguin paintings, you know, and also like the colonial interest in primitivism, right? And saying, like, well, you know, I mean, he's not going to New York to paint 13 and 14 year old girls in the nude or, you know, marry them and abandon their kids too, right? He's kind of a jerk, right? And it's definitely in the artwork. And it's definitely because that kind of thing was at least acceptable enough that people were like, well, let's exhibit these. You know, this. This Lost Eden. And look at these paintings, right?
- [35:46]
Alison Lee
Well, he had a really hard time getting those exhibited in his lifetime.
- [35:52]
Mary Beth Willard
I mean, one of the things that's really interesting for me is thinking about, like, just how. How contingent it all is, right? The idea that this was kind of a trendy. I don't want to say trend. Trendy is the wrong word. But this idea that primitivism was appealing, right? So then there's. People are interested in this. So he's like, well, this is what I've got to do to make my career. And then that influences how other people think about this, right? So there's. For the art historian, and I know I'm preaching badly to the choir here, you know, this thinking about how. How you present that, right? Because it's not like you can just say, like, oh, pretend Gauguin never happened. Well, he did, right? And he influenced people and he influenced artists working. Pacific artists working today. They're saying, like, hey. And I've looked at Catherine Vercoe's work a little bit. She's an art historian based somewhere in New Zealand, I believe. I don't remember which university off the top of my head, but in an interview that she's helpfully posted on YouTube or a talk that she posted on YouTube, the artists are basically saying, like, please don't ban Gauguin, because that's the only reason that people who don't know much about art take us seriously. Like, once they look at our work, they recognize the value of it. But we need Gauguin as, like, a reason for people to be interested in what Pacific artists are doing, right? So you see this kind of transformative thing. It's like, sure, he's a jerk, but because he's a jerk and he's well known, these artists can get attention that they might not otherwise get from the mainstream art world, which I think is an interesting wrinkle in how we ought to respond to the problem.
- [37:25]
Alison Lee
Yeah, a wrinkle, indeed. I want to push forward into chapter two, which is titled why artists probably won't notice your boycott. And this is where you really dig into kind of, you know, considering whether we're ethically required to boycott immoral artists and to punish as a means of punishing them for their misdeeds or as a means of supporting their victims or to avoid being complicit in their behavior. You kind of hit this from a number of different, different angles. There's a, there's a lot in this chapter. And I found this idea that you put forward about us as consumers and saying that our power is very limited specifically because we are not very important to artists. I found that quite interesting. You say flat out at one point, quote, they matter to us, but we don't matter to them. And I thought, oh, really? You know, excuse me, that's, you know, that's interesting. And it made me wonder, do you know many artists or have you talked to a lot of them? In my experience with them and also with kind of the museums and galleries that show their work, that promote them, that make them famous and successful, people's opinions matter a lot. There's a lot of power, especially in kind of the collective that is the museum going public. So I wondered, where does that fit into all this?
- [38:53]
Mary Beth Willard
Alright. So.
- [38:55]
Alison Lee
So good, so good, so good.
- [38:57]
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Alison Lee
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Mary Beth Willard
Cause there's always something new.
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- [40:25]
Mary Beth Willard
Good. That's a really good question. So I think what I would say to this is that you should really focus on thinking about this as an individual, right? Because the way I was thinking about this and the way I tried to set it up in the second chapter is wondering, is there an ethical obligation for me to say, stop listening to Michael Jackson? Michael Jackson's a really bad case in any way because he's dead and his estate has so much money that it's not even clear where it would go, what the marginal value of my 1 extra Spotify listen would do. But I find that that's actually often the case we find ourselves in, right? Where there's, as one of my friends put it recently in a publication, many are too rich and many are too dead. Right. For us to actually have an influence on their behavior. But that's often how we talk about it, right? So when I was drafting the chapter and then part of the book, a lot of people were talking about the Leaving Neverland documentary and the idea that, like, the ethical fan has to respond to this by doing something, right, by refusing to listen to Michael Jackson or refusing to play his music or not introducing it to their kids. And so part of me was thinking, like, okay, I can see the symbolic importance of that, and I try to treat that in chapter three. But let's think about this from a collective action sort of perspective, because we know that, for example, if you were actually to have a large social media movement like the MeToo movement was very briefly, that does make people care. People do care what people think, right? But now you're thinking, like, two years on, right? And you learn of an artist immoral behavior, and you say, okay, I can do whatever I want, but am I ethically required to boycott this artist? And the idea is just like, it's an extra. Like, think of how small your contribution is, you know, the 4,000ths of a cent that your listen would give to Michael Jackson. And it's so tiny in most cases that unless you have some kind of assurance, I think, that your action will meaningfully be part of a larger collective action, right? That there's no requirement for you to do it, right? So it's a fairly narrow claim, right? Is that you're not ethically required to boycott it. Because at least that argument doesn't give you a good reason to do it. You're not going to change their behavior, you're not going to punish them. And part of the reason I dedicated so much time to this was the numerous media articles and hot takes and news reports that made it feel kind of like this is sort of being like an ethical consumer. It's like eating fair trade chocolate, right? Or buying free range eggs. The idea that there's a good you could be doing. And I think about it, right, like if I could stop an artist from harming somebody or serve out punishment that the justice system didn't give by not listening to music, I mean, that would be an incredible power. But I think just as an individual consumer, it is kind of outsized, right? And as you quoted from the book where I said, they matter a lot to us, we don't matter much to them. Yeah, I think I'll stand by that. I mean, it's often disproportionately the case, right? I mean, if you listen to a lot of music, right, you know, you probably have, you know, it's been the soundtrack to your life, right? You have certain memories associated with it. You know, the artist got you through real hard times or, you know, you listened to something on repeat while you were finishing your dissertation or whatever the story is for you and that artist. But that's a lot more time that you've invested that they haven't. So I think, I mean, this is like putting on my very bad amateur psychology hat. But I think a lot of what drives it is it's kind of like, I cared about this, I loved what you did, and then you turned out to be a jerk. I feel like I've wasted my time, right? The artist does not have that kind of emotional engagement with the fans. Like maybe as a collective, they would rather be loved than hated. They don't want their museum show to be canceled or something. They care about what people think, but at the level of one individual moving them to be a better person. Which is often how this comes about and especially in the context of social media, right? Like I don't want to be, I don't want to be. How should I put it, too pessimistic about the promise of collective action, right? But if you look at the successful ones in history, they required a lot more organization than a hashtag. And that's often from the perspective of the end consumer, all you're seeing.
- [45:10]
Alison Lee
Yeah, yeah. I felt like what was interesting about this too, this argument within, within this chapter is kind of where it led you and you end up going some really interesting places in this chapter. You end up sort of including arguing that giving up meat is essentially not worth it because again, it's such a small individual contribution that it ends up not mattering much on its own. And you say that it makes sense to contribute to a collective goal only if we can be assured others will join us. And I think I wrote in the margin, danger, danger. I'm worried about this, right?
- [45:49]
Mary Beth Willard
Because I mean, I just thought that.
- [45:51]
Alison Lee
Could go such, that's such a dangerous argument to make because it strikes me that you could use that as a reasoning for saying it's okay to be so many bad things, including racist. And you could use that as a justification for why you should be able to keep your guns even though there are people shooting, you know, children in schools. I mean, like, how can, you know, how can you go there, I guess, in this context without realizing or avoiding it being extrapolated out to these cases and used co opted in that horrible way?
- [46:26]
Mary Beth Willard
Good, good. So I will point out that I think my argument goes the other way because there are people making these arguments that, you know, maybe we don't have an obligation to say, for example, stop eating meat. And the argument is very similar, not surprising, because I read it writing the book that if you think about like the supply chain that it takes to get a hamburger, right? And the small amount of the very limited power that the individual consumer has, right? And you say, okay, so we agree that factory farming is bad, but one of the downsides of having such a complicated industrial farming system is that it's not really sensitive to the actions of what individuals are doing, right? So it's not, it's not like I can go up to the farmer and say, you know, I would buy your chickens if you treated them better, right? They arrive at the store in a plastic package and I, you know, if I buy chicken, then I'm giving them money. If I don't buy chicken and I buy something else that like the, it's a really bad, let's say, signal to noise ratio, right? Like the idea that I'm effectively communicating that I'm concerned about animal welfare I think is very small. And so I do worry about this, but I think I take the worry in a different direction. Like I don't think we know how to solve collective action problems. And I think that's part of the problem, right? Like we have a lot of problems, most of the big ones facing us right now, climate change, animal welfare. You know, you mentioned Gun control. Are all cases even, like, just voting? Right. Are all cases where the individual doesn't have a lot of power? And I want to say that, like, I don't want to. I see the danger, right? Like the danger. I want to write danger in the margins, too, but I don't want to say that. Well, it doesn't apply because. Well, because why, right? Why isn't it dangerous? I think the problem is that we have big problems that require collective action in order to solve and that we are told or encouraged to think of this as, like, we can solve this with individual choice, right? So it is demonstrably bad for the environment that we consume animals in the way that we do, right? Not great for them either. But let's just take the environmental cost. So what do we say? Do we say regulate them? Do we say go after the institutions? Do we say change the market incentives? Or do we say, it's your fault for going to the grocery store, you should eat less. And so I think one thing I would say is that a lot of these problems are institutional problems, and institutional problems require institutional solutions. And to get back to the subject of art, I think that's true there too, right? If you think, look, what did we really want to happen to Michael Jackson? And I mentioned this at the end. I'm like, nowhere in my top 10 of things that I think should happen would be that, like, he should be being boycotted 20 years after his death. Like, he should have gone to jail, right? He should have been. He should have gone to jail in 1992 or whenever it was. And what we needed, that is we needed institutions to take victims seriously. We needed, you know, prosecutions to happen. We needed, you know, we needed. We needed our institutions to work properly. And I think a lot of the frustration, again, amateur psychologists, hat again, is that we're trying to solve with kind of like individual consumer measures, something that never should have been our issue in the first place. You know, the first time, you know, Weinstein sexually assaulted somebody, she. She should have been able to. To go to the cops and have something happen. Or the culture on the set should have been just like, yeah, we don't work with guys like that. So it's the kind of thing that doesn't happen, right? And so where you see danger, and I agree with the danger, I want to say you can't solve a collective action problem, though, by turning it into an individual solution, right? It's still a collective action problem, and that's why they're so hard to solve, right? Because I think if we all recognize, like, I mean, think about it like this. If you thought legitimately that, like, yeah, we do have a moral obligation to not listen to the art of immoral. Enjoy the art of immoral artists. Right? Enjoy the work of immoral artists. Like, we'd get the feedback right away. We'd be like, oh, yeah, we just don't do it. And then, and then they're good, right? Or then they're punished. And we don't see any of that. So I think the problem is how do we fix our institutions? And that's probably the real question, which I, you know, admittedly I don't really take up in the book, but the idea of, you know, for most of us, the work that we can do is quite a bit smaller, right? So maybe if it's, you know, your friend at the local concert, right? At the, you know, local band competition or whatever. I don't know. Imagine like your 80s high school montage, whatever it is, if he's sexually harassing people. Yeah. There you have an obligation to do something. I'm less convinced that this is anything. It's just too far. The causal chains are too thin. And the idea that I want to take is not so much like there's nothing we can do. Do what you want, but this is the wrong way of thinking about it. Thinking about this as a different kind of consumption will solve this problem. That's not what's going to solve the problem. And because it's not going to solve the problem, there's no ethical importance. But I. So I wouldn't take it as like, I don't, I don't, you know, I don't care about collective action things. I'm just saying that trying to reduce it to an individual obligation is not actually what's going to. What's going to solve the problem. So if that makes sense.
- [52:14]
Alison Lee
Yeah. And I, you know, I thought it was interesting because at the end of this chapter, or I guess it was later in the chapter, I don't know if it's at the very end, but you. You do end up saying, and I found this very poignant, we need to change not the culture at large, but ourselves. And I thought, you know, that's so interesting and goes a little bit against what you were saying in terms of, you know, that giving up the artworks of immoral artists is ethically pointless from the perspective of punishing them at least, because we're so powerless on an individual level. But I thought, yeah, aren't there really positive effects to Giving up these artworks that might be had for each of us, ourselves. It isn't just about punishing people always, but about, you know, living a moral life, trying to do good in the world. And doesn't positive change have to start with yourself on some level and kind of, as you say in this book, questioning, what is it that I'm enjoying or continuing to enjoy about these works now that I know what I know about them, Can I, you know, am I going to still dance and jam to Michael Jackson or me? You say, you come out and say that you just can't listen to those Cosby records anymore. You know, you. You admit that there's a line maybe for each of us, and that line is different. But I'm very interested in this idea of, okay, you know, collective action is a problem. And you're right, enough people have to do it for it to have an effect. But don't we all have responsibility for each of us, ourselves for it to begin there?
- [53:59]
Mary Beth Willard
So I think we do, right? And I think we do have an obligation to try to be. I mean, this is a very hand. Wavy obligation, right? But to think of a way to be better people, right? This is like the good Place. Like, they're just going to try to improve as a person. And I think considered that kind of response to the problem of immoral artists in chapter three, right? And that's the one that gets. It's a little more technical, and it's a little bit about thinking of developing virtues, specifically the. The virtue of being the kind of person who would understand where a victim is coming from, right? The understand also the sort of person that somebody could confide in. I think we do have an obligation to do that, right? And this is also the point in the book I said, this is the place where I get the closest to saying, like, sometimes it's not going to be okay, right. To engage with the art of an immoral artist here, though, and this is a really philosopher's kind of distinction, right? Like, because we like to, like, draw the lines as finely as possible, I think we can distinguish between engaging with their artwork and what engaging with their artwork expresses. Right? And I think most of the ethical issue is about what it expresses, right? So, like, for example, about 15 years ago, it seemed really common, at least in my social circles, for people to have elaborately choreographed dances at weddings, like for the bridal party, right? Like, they would do something fun. And a lot of people were doing the Thriller dance, mostly because it's hilarious and instantly recognizable to have, you Know, the bride and the groom doing the zombie arms and doing the steps. And you could see right now, like, that would not go over well right now. Actually, it might. Now it's 2022. It wouldn't happen 2019. Right. So I wonder sometimes about, like, people, you know, going back through their old bridal videos and whether they cringe about it, right? But I think, like, the problem isn't, like, with listening to Thriller or even dancing to it. It's in that context, what you're expressing would be a certain insensitivity toward victims, and that's what you're trying to avoid, right? So the reason that there isn't like a blanket prohibition on, like, don't listen to the art of, you know, the music of Michael Jackson or laugh at comedy like that is that I think it's often very determined by context, right? So you could have contexts where everybody is critically on the same page. You and your Woody Allen fan club friends are getting together to watch his movies. But you're also setting aside some time to talk about what you think about Dylan Farrow's allegations, right? That seems like a context in which, like, you can be very clear. What you're expressing is not that you don't believe her or that you don't believe victims, but that you're trying to wrestle with it. Right? And I think that what's expressed can vary very much by context, Right? So I think I say at one point, like, maybe don't blast R. Kelly out the windows on your college campus right now, because that's going to be perceived, I think correctly, as being insensitive to survivors of sexual assault. Right. On the other hand, I think I mentioned this too. About a year later, I'm driving around in my car, and I'm sure this is true everywhere, but Utah in particular, really loves Halloween and haunted houses. And it's like a thing here. So the radio, right, ordinary radio station, is like, full of advertisements for haunted houses. And half of them start with the opening chords and then the baseline of Thriller, right? And so this is like October of 2020. We're in the middle of a global pandemic. And of course, I'm, like, finishing up the draft of the book, reworking it. So I hear it and I'm like, oh, my God, I can't believe they're still playing it. Nobody else cares, right?
- [57:52]
Alison Lee
Why?
- [57:52]
Mary Beth Willard
Look at the context shifted, right? So it probably would have been inappropriate, right, as the documentary was coming out to be. I don't going around blasting the music, but at Halloween. There's like three Halloween songs and one of them is Monster Mash. Right. And you've got to play, play Thriller then. So I think a lot of it's by context, right. So I guess the way to say it is I think there's generally an obligation to try to become a better person. Right. To become more virtuous, to develop the virtue of epistemic justice, to try to be a more. Try to be sensitive. Right. But I don't think that that means in most cases or it says in general rule that means you can't engage with the work of immoral artists because a lot of that's going to depend on context. Right. You're an art historian. You've got to talk about Gauguin, otherwise you're kind of not doing your job. Right. You could talk about him in different ways though, Right? You could talk about him in ways that, you know, make manifest the colonialist nonsense behind what he decided to paint. You can critique it. Right. But those are all forms of engagement. Right. And I think that. And there are also contexts where maybe it wouldn't be appropriate.
- [59:13]
Alison Lee
Yeah, you know, I've tried it both ways since. Since you bring it up, you know, I've tried, I think, and have successfully just completely avoided talking about him altogether in courses, you know, where we're going through modern art or going through the survey of. Of the masterpieces of the last 500, 600 years. And I think there are other artists you can put in his place and to talk about post Impressionism and then some years I've done it like you said, and. And assigned articles. And there are some, you know, that really try to Dr. The problems, the difficulties, the what do we do's surrounding Gauguin. I think what I also found really interesting and as you say, there's a lot in this third chapter. It's very technical and maybe it was the one that I liked the most because there was so much to kind of grapple with. But you were starting to get at a little bit in your response to my question. What comes up at the end of this chapter in terms of the distinction you make between public and private enjoyment? And I want to make sure we get this in. I know we're running out of time, but you say it's really important to distinguish between privately engaging with an artwork, which I guess is like listening to R. Kelly with your windows rolled up or with your headphones on, versus semi publicly engaging with an artwork versus publicizing that you're engaging with an artwork and you Say that, quote, aesthetically appreciating a beloved artwork by oneself doesn't undermine the MeToo movement because the act of appreciating doesn't communicate anything without an audience. And I was so struck by this. And again, I thought by this rationale, it's fine if you look at and enjoy Gauguin's paintings of naked 13 year old girls that he raped, as long as you do it in the, like a dark room by yourself. Like, wait a minute, by yourself.
- [61:05]
Mary Beth Willard
That would be really weird, right?
- [61:08]
Alison Lee
But that would be an example of.
- [61:10]
Mary Beth Willard
Pride, but it wouldn't express anything, right? So I mean, my claim. This is good. My claim is that the context matters a lot in terms of what an act of appreciating or engaging with an artwork expresses, right? So the Gauguin case is weird because most of us wouldn't look, I mean, we don't have Gauguin painting. Like, it's not a private thing. They're museums, right? So the museum context is different. But think about, like showing the pictures as you might in a classroom, right, where you are working very hard as an art historian to contextualize this. So you're like post impressionist, blah, blah, blah, mangoes and exploitation, blah, blah, blah. And this is why this is important. And that seems like a case where, you know, it's not that it's going to be easy or there aren't going to be, you know, people who might be upset or feathered, but it's a case where you can say, like, look, we are engaged in a project of scholarly exploration and we can be responsive to that. It's very different, I think, than having an art exhibition like a museum, right? Where it's like, this person is worth looking at. That's a different kind of expressive act. So for me, I think that the reason I use music here is it's the kind of thing you can put headphones on without it sounding extremely contrived. I don't think you'd be harming anybody or necessarily even harming your own soul if you were listening to R. Kelly on your headphones. But I think you'd have a very hard time playing it in a public context while being able to control what you express by it. And so what I wanted to do in this third chapter is be mindful that what you express might not be what you intend, right? Like you might be intending like, hey, this is just a great track, but the what you express by the action that you undertake isn't entirely up to you, right? It's Determined by context, by what other people think, by, you know, how this normally goes in your culture, for example. And I think that being sensitive to that, I think, is where a lot of the real ethical work is done. And what I want to say is that. But again, I think that this is a case where the consumer's problem is actually pretty small. It's very circumscribed. I'm listening to it, I'm looking at it, I'm enjoying it. I'm reading it. It's more about, do I allow my Spotify playlist back when you could get them on Spotify, to post to my Facebook feed without any context? Do I. Do people make mixtapes anymore? But that's like the analogy that comes to mind. Like, would I put it on a mixtape for a friend? Would I recommend it enthusiastically? Or would I, you know, caveat it a little bit? Right. And I think that, like, that's often where the ethical question is, right? It's about how we create a constructive environment for other people. And again, it's a very philosopher's sort of distinction, right, to say that. But sometimes it doesn't matter that much. And in those cases, it's really hard to say that there's an ethical obligation not to. But back to the Gauguin case. Aside from it being weird to look at a painting in the dark in a closet, I think one of the hard things about that case is that it does seem like the harm is in the artwork in a way that a lot of the other examples aren't. Right. The harm is not. Not just that he painted something. Like if he had painted, I don't know, still lifes, Right? He just painted grapes or something. It wouldn't seem. He'd be like, okay, I'll look at the grapes and this guy's a jerk, and maybe we can talk about it. But I think that because of, you know, how the exploitation basically ends up on the canvas for him, it makes it very different and makes it a little harder, I think, intuitively to get your head around, like, why would you be doing that by yourself? Right? But I think if you think that the ethics attaches mostly to what you're expressing to other people, Right? And whether you're. And in the third chapter, whether you can, like, engage with this artist artwork while trying to be a good person on your own, I think most of the time, private engagement isn't really the issue. It's about, do you put Michael Jackson on the playlist for the end of the year, elementary school party? Should the marching band play I Believe I Can Fly as part of their halftime show? Should the museum, you know, show the traveling Gauguin exposition? Should he be part of the. I don't know, like, around here they're doing, like, the 3D. Do yoga in the light projection things are really popular. Should Gauguin get one? I don't think so. I think that would be a really, really weird situation to do yoga. Right. But, like, that's the question. Right? The question is how we react again, in institutions and in these contexts. So, yeah, public, private isn't always necessarily the right way to think of the distinction, although it's convenient shorthand for thinking about, like, where you have control over the context of expression. Right. About what gets expressed by your decision to engage with an artwork.
- [66:28]
Alison Lee
Well, I have taken up a lot of your time. I appreciate you grappling with some of these questions that the book left me with. But I want to ask you the traditional quick last question here on New Books Network, which is, what are you working on now? What can we look forward to coming out in the future from you?
- [66:45]
Mary Beth Willard
Well, I've just wrapped up a series of articles. These are more academic, in the British Journal of Aesthetics on the problem of ethics and immoral art, which actually takes up some of these questions about expressiveness and publicity and where do we go from here? I'm also right now thinking more about some of the stuff that I introduced in the sixth chapter, about what it means to have an aesthetic commitment or a project and how the art that we choose to love or the practices that we choose to undertake shape our lives and what it means to have an aesthetic outlook on a life. It's not quite sure what I'm doing with it yet, actually. I'm in the fun, experimental exploring stages of reading and thinking and writing down ideas and tossing half of them out. But that's where I think I'm going at the moment.
- [67:33]
Alison Lee
Those are fun stages. Well, we will look forward to seeing that work come out. Mary Beth, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
- [67:42]
Mary Beth Willard
Thank you. I've had a lot of fun.
- [67:44]
Alison Lee
All right, everybody. You have been listening to New Books in Art, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. My name is Alison Lee, and I've been talking to Mary Beth Willard about her new book, why it's okay to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists. As always, if you have questions or comments about this episode, you can contact me through my website@alisonlee.com or find me on Instagram. Professor Lee thanks so much for listening.
- [68:25]
Mary Beth Willard
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- [68:38]
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