Lincoln Michel: People really need to give up the idea there's any connection between morality and art. Immoral people are capable of creating moving, empathetic art. Nothing about writing dark and violent art implies the artist is themselves dark and violent. Etc. There just isn't a connection.

People really need to give up the idea there's any connection between morality and art. Immoral people are capable of creating moving, empathetic art. Nothing about writing dark and violent art implies the artist is themselves dark and violent. Etc. There just isn't a connection.

Similarly, there's no connection between enjoying art and morality. Reading happy, hopepunk work doesn't make you a good person. Enjoying dark, and challenging art doesn't make you a bad person. We are all drawn to create and consume art for many indiscernible and unknown reasons.

None of this is to say art exists in a moral vacuum. Great art does not "cancel out" an artist's immoral acts. It's that the quality and themes of art are not an indicator of a person's morality and can't be used as a guide to guess who is or isn't moral outside of their art.

This is what I mean. It is not the case that the majority of crime writers, horror writers, and so forth are themselves violent people in real life. Writing "dark" work but not committing evil acts is the norm. It isn't the exception.

If I could edit my first post, I'd reword because it isn't that there's *no* connection exactly. It is that one can't know the connection from the art alone. We can't know if an artist is drawn to a topic because they're processing something, hiding something, simply interested, a combination, etc.

As an example of why making all these assumptions based on the art alone is dangerous: www.vox.com/the-highligh...

A sci-fi writer got meta about gender. The internet responded by ruining her life.www.vox.com Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” drew the ire of the internet. A year later, she’s still picking through the wreckage.

I finally read that this week. It was good! Smartly written and funny.

All really good points and I wonder if this is a perpetual question that never gets resolved in our cultures because people are too drawn to trying to treat it like a puzzle that has a solution for particular artists and works.

Loved that story.

This. Art is not an AI prompt. Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings after living through war, Ballard wrote Crash.

And so often people's judgements are horribly wrong. Not just in the "I didn't realize they were a monster" way but equally in the opposite direction. E.g., Isabel Fall.

Or because it's a culturally accessible short-hand for getting at something else. How many people think the violence in Blood Meridian is *just* because Cormac McCarthy was preoccupied with violence? Like Judge Holden was an historical guy. He's also Satan.

It's the whole hindsight is 20:20 thing. The art itself does not give you instructions on how to read the artist. Looking for the secrets in the text for the creator's sins or virtues is a bad idea

I love how this always turns into artistic phrenology. Figuring out which skull ridge makes you write Problematic Fiction

Getting a lot of Entartete Kunst vibes from this part of Bluesky.

"torment an audience" you BOUGHT THE TICKET, JAN

Yeah, i mean, I'm notably fragile about a lot of "dark" books, so what i do is, i DON'T READ THEM. This is a me problem, not an author problem!

The Puriteens will never go away.

Some of them learned to talk like Mencius Moldbug, too, it seems

I block five to ten every week and more keep showing up.

Taps the sign: bsky.app/profile/zakj...

How about ?

That sure is a lot of words to say "I'm a loser with no reading comprehension or fiction-understanding."

Just looping back into this lady

Reading that thread, it just seems like that person doesn't like violent art and is building a moral scaffolding to prop up their personal taste.

It's basically repackaging sin as a moral consumption then getting upset when people don't agree with you. I can like action movies, I can write fantasy knights killing each other, it doesn't mean I'm "preoccupied with violence" (???)

I have seen more comedy than any other genre.

this person seems to be positing not so much that most people who write about murder (say) are doing murder irl, but that their interest is prurient rather than...virtuous? which is a bit frustrating, since i think convincing someone that thoughts/feelings aren't morally important the way action is

is a lot more difficult than convincing them they have a factually untrue belief about correlation or causality

it's so strange to be concerned about a "preoccupation with violence." Violence is a terrifying and inescapable part of the human condition. Of course people are preoccupied with violence—it's only natural. What's wrong with exploring that through art?

"Vast majority"? I just want to know how these children know this.

cuz they fucking know ~everything~, of course.

Being preoccupied with violence is not the same as being violent. Those are two different things. Like, for example, someone who was traumatized by a violent assault and now has hypervigilance for potential violence as a symptom of PTSD is, indeed, "preoccupied with violence". Preoccupation just…

…means that the person thinks about it a lot, that it's meaningful to them, in whatever way. That COULD be as a perpetrator, but it could also be as someone frightened of it, or fascinated by it, or fascinated by why people do it, or by the effects it have, or whatever. And generally speaking…

…writers write about the things they're preoccupied with, the things that draw their attention and they want to think about, to talk about, the things they have views and feelings and perspectives on. If you keep writing books about violence, you are preoccupied with violence. That doesn't mean…

the late Richard Laymon, writer of some very extreme horror stuff, had a reputation as one of the nicest guys in the scene IIRC. And stories about actors are littered with how people who played villains, monsters, and utter bastards were lovely people

Feels like we haven't gotten past fox news hand-wringing about kids playing FPS games.

I love crime fiction. My favorite classic movies are noirs and thrillers. I like it In all flavors from Sherlock Holmes to Psych. I think I'm drawn to the mystery and the intrigue. They're like puzzles and/or edge of your seat anticipation. Still haven't done a heist. Maybe some day.

A vacuum is by definition a state of disconnection. It isn't as simple as Good People make Good Art and Bad People make Bad Art. But there are useful discussions to be had beyond that binary.

I can see that I'm not the only one saying this here but leaving this as I think it is still important. It is so tempting to reduce these things to simple binaries. But it doesn't help.

I forget which journalist who interviewed Putin was bestowed with the revelation that Putin adores the Beatles. Even more surprising, his favorite song was NOT "Happiness is a Warm Gun" or "Back in the USSR" (I forget what it was. something not especially obvious)

Yeah, lately I’ve been seeing a lot lately of “that person wrote about murder/hate crimes/assault/adultery/underage smoking so they’re clearly sus” & why do you do the system’s work for it, so enthusiastically.

*”lately I’ve been seeing a lot lately,” whoops

This argument always sounds identical to those victorian men who insisted reading novels would make young girls into sluts, to me.

this misconception feels like maybe a half step removed from thinking pretty people must be good and ugly people must be bad. cruel people can be capable of creating great beauty! kind people can be capable of creating great monstrosities! it's a big part of why art is so cool.

My mind always goes to the amazing Molly Ringwald essay on “problematic art”. Really interesting read about her relationship with the films she made and how they have not aged well. www.newyorker.com/culture/pers...

What About “The Breakfast Club”?www.newyorker.com Revisiting the movies of my youth in the age of #MeToo.

But there is a connection between my supporting immoral people through their art. There are artists and authors whose work I love, but I refuse to partake of any longer, due to my knowledge of their "sins" - voting with my wallet. Maybe that makes me a Philistine, but I've reached this point.

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