 Who's excited about solving one of the biggest questions in art tonight? We're going to get all the answers. Are you excited? All of them. It's all going to be solved tonight. It's a great pleasure to be here with you at ANU tonight at the invitation of Learning Communities and ANU alumni to host this debate and tackle a very big topic. It is one that I find myself talking about every other day in this new climate, relatively new climate of speaking up, speaking out and finding out about the private lives of our public heroes. Can we ever truly separate the art from the artist? And should we? These are the questions we're going to be exploring. On the 18th of March, 2017, Chuck Berry died. The death of this legend, one of the architects of rock and roll, inspired thousands of tributes in the days that followed. Berry's legacy in music is huge. If you don't know, he created the American archetype. It was a style, it was a sound, it was a performance. The Beatles copied him. Keith Richards has said that he pretty much stole every guitar lick that Berry ever played. He was the founding father and created the very attitude of rock and roll. He also spent 18 months in prison in the 1960s after illegally transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines. In the 90s, Chuck Berry was sued by 52 women for filming them via a secret camera set up in the bathroom of the restaurant that he owned. As the ABC's National Music Correspondent, I was kind of interested to see that in the obituaries that followed in the days following his death, how various other media outlets and musicians reflected on his life, you know, which parts were kept in and which were left out in remembering this legend. Now more so than ever, we're questioning what we previously let slide in the creative sphere. And an artist's space is often defined by its very lack of boundaries. I mean, there are no rules. That's often what makes it so good and so attractive to us normies. It's what makes artists better than us. You know, they're enigmas who create that magical something out of nothing that the whole world can rally around. The rock star, the auteur, the untouchable, the pedestals that we put creators on often also kind of create that self-imposed distance to us as well. We excuse certain behaviors because we justify that it's what leads to great art. We don't want to disrupt the process. Artists occupy a great sacred space and their art actually makes its way into our sacred space. It becomes part of us. To separate the art from the artist is for some to actually protect the art that we love. It's ours. It shapes our identities. It makes sense of our place in the world. Do we lose that if we stand against its creator? And what do we do with the art that's left behind? I remember when I was a little kid being obsessed with Michael Jackson. I've lost count of the amount of times that I've watched Moonwalker. I can pretty much recite it from beginning to end. And the premiers of his video clips on primetime television seemed like a national event to me. His songs have really soundtracked my whole life. And this is an artist whose music crosses generations, but it was really during my childhood that Michael Jackson became quite literally the most famous person and the most famous artist on the planet. And from a purely critical point of view, he remains one of the greatest pop artists of all time. He is multi-talented or was multi-talented in a way that we actually may never see again. A couple of months ago, Leaving Neverland screened on televisions all over the world. How many people have seen that documentary? Interesting. Not as many as I thought. Well, if you haven't seen it, it was a four-hour long and incredibly raw account by two men who alleged that they were sexually abused by Michael Jackson when they were young boys. Now, they weren't the first to make such claims, but theirs came more than a decade after his death. And the issues around Jackson's right of reply have been fairly raised since, I mean, he's no longer here to defend these latest allegations. But I noticed, I guess most obviously in the conversations following the initial shock of that TV special, a more personal and subjective response to what we were seeing. We turned inward. We were searching for our own moral compass in our reactions. Do I stop playing Michael Jackson songs now? Is that what I'm supposed to do? What happens when his music comes on the speakers in a shop? What happens when the DJ drops thriller at my friend's wedding reception? Some people actually told me that they didn't want to watch it. They knew what it could do to their own relationship, and it would cause a crack in the bond that they shared with his work. It was an inconvenient truth. Art evokes emotion in all of us. It speaks to us, whether through song or screen or canvas. When we pull back the curtain on a creator's life and the view isn't so pretty, it can feel as though that connection is tainted, as though our own relationship with that is tainted. As Jason Green wrote on Pitchfork earlier this year, living with music in your mind from an abuser sometimes feels like being settled with someone else's bad dreams. How do we make peace with these bad dreams once they have become our own? From a purely practical standpoint, and yes, I'm going to talk about cancellation culture, how do you cancel an artist like Michael Jackson? I mean, his creative influence spreads deep into the culture. He has shaped popular music for more than 50 years. And as Wesley Morris from the New York Times said, a fantastic critic, Jackson is a part of pop culture on a molecular level. And even if we do cancel him, what does that do for the conversation? Does it also silence the conversation and the discussion that we should be having? My field of study, as some of you probably know, and my passion, my career revolves around music. But of course, this quandary extends into every creative field. And these questions have been asked for eons. This is not a new topic. But for the first time, the extent in which abuse and oppression has affected mostly women in every industry, that's being laid bare for the first time ever. And those responsible are finally being held accountable. Picasso, known misogynist, he regarded women as machines for suffering. He himself categorized his work under seven distinct styles, each tied to the seven relationships that he had with his muses. And two of those muses committed suicide on account of him. His granddaughter Marina Picasso said that in her memoir that he would extract his muses' essence. And once they were bled dry, he would just discard of them. Picasso hasn't been canceled. His work is celebrated on gallery walls and in sculpture parks the world over. Is there an opportunity to revisit or recontextualize an artist's work within the context of the life that he actually led? Arts often spoken about as a cultural, emotional, and sometimes mystical entity. As I said before, it's that magical something that you create from nothing. But it also very much lives in the commercial world. So when we hand over cash to experience art from creators with questionable histories, does that make us complicit? Do we buy that R. Kelly album? Do we get tickets to that Louis C.K. comedy stand-up show? Or do we head to the movies to see the latest Woody Allen film or get Roman Polanski's classics out on DVD? The pendulum has swung in the wake of the so-called Me Too movement. I hate that term, but it exists and we all know what it means because it's been around forever. More than ever, certain people are being called to account for their behavior and more than ever, people are listening to victims. We're becoming more aware of the ways in which this behavior has fostered too. We finally understand the grooming, the gas sliding, the complicity, and the ubiquitous harassment in every industry. These are concepts that not everyone was wise to in the 50s and in the 80s, even 10 years ago. So what do we do with this information? Is it part of the artist's humanity? Or is it something that we can square away? How can we separate the art from the artist? In October last year, Constance Grady wrote a great piece for Vox Online, and its title was What Do We Do When The Art We Love Was Created By A Monster? Heavy title. Her approach was very academic. She used theories of literary critics through the ages. There was new criticism post-modernism and the new historicists movement, and she pretty much used this with different academics to find her way through the thorny question of separating the art from the artist. Now, spoiler alert, she fell short of finding a definitive answer. However, one scholar made this point. Lecturer Claire Hayes-Brady said that at the end of the day, a work of art is one that speaks to you and just to you. It's not a rational decision what we love. It's not possible to have loved a text and then to retrospectively unlove it. So tonight my challenge to the rational thinkers in the room is to go one better. We're going to solve this. Are you ready? Are you ready? Good. Come on guys, are you ready? Okay, that's better. It's Thursday night. Our speakers for the affirmative. Professor Denise Ferris is the head of A&U School of Art and Design. She's lectured at A&U since 1987 and as well as teaching Denise's works can be seen in major public collections at the National Gallery, the National Library and the Australian War Memorial. Dr Robert Wellington is a senior lecturer at the A&U Centre for Art and History and Theory. He's got a fascination with Louis XIV and a special interest in the role of material culture in history making and cross-cultural exchange and on the end we have Ray Maria, lawyer, writer, leadership coach and A&U alumna and she can also recite most of the lyrics to Baby Got Back which we may use at some point in the debate. For the negative, Dr Kim Kunio is the head of A&U School of Music, has a passion for musicology, ethnomusicology and his work has been performed everywhere from music festivals to the White House. He's been commissioned by arts festivals and the Olympics alike even collaborated with Antarctic ice most recently as he was telling me over dinner. Next to Kim, Dr Monique Rooney is convener of the A&U Screen Studies Program and senior lecturer in English Literature. Dr Rooney's research finds the kind of connections between the screen and other texts and Dave, oh sorry, Monique is at the end, Dave you guys swapped. Dave in the middle is the director of, Dave Caffrey I should say, is the director of Art Not A Part Festival and Dionysus and another A&U alumna. He's also the minister for party affairs of the Australian Dance Party, not a political party in case you were hoping to vote for them in a couple of weeks and volunteers as the president of Music ACT. Let's hear what they have to say our first speaker for the affirmative Professor Denise Ferris. Okay welcome. All right so can you ever truly separate art from the artist and my question when I was asked to be here tonight was well you can but should you but let's keep on the sort of affirmative side and let's not be too nuanced which is what I also suggested the debate should be and let's just sort of take a polarized binary position on this which is probably not the answer but let's just do it just for fun. Okay so I'm going to show you some appropriately it's called karma pixelated works of great art of art enjoyed by millions and millions of people for a very long time and that's who the art was by by a murderer yeah by someone who uh who has uh got away with it kind of but who's uh juriskiro and whose artwork is incredibly famous and most people would not know that about Caravaggio when we when we look at his work because most people would not look into the context of that in terms of their research they would just simply consume consume the art also some paintings by a Frenchman artwork by Paul Gauguin who was a wife beater who had three brides in his paradise all who had syphilis because of his actions and who died a very lonely man because actually in his time in his time people started to think he was actually very on the nose so for people there when he went back to Paris he was actually um disavowed you could say if you wanted to use art speak and uh he was seen as a sort of persona non grata and that was his fate at the time at the at the time this work is evidently by first nations artists in Australia a Torres Strait Islander artist who said to be the finest Torres Strait Islander artist ever to be publicly known in Australia and with this work who won the 29th Telstra Indigenous Award some years ago his name is Dennis Nono he's currently in jail serving time for a crime uh and that's the context that actually allows his work not to be seen so the work that you've seen here you will never see in a public museum you will never see in publication you will not see it so the work is lost to the nation because no one will show his work because of the background and the reputation and because of quite quite evidently the the heinous crimes that he actually committed so that is the nuance of the judgments that we make that is the nuance of the retrospective position that we take when we uh don't know but then we know and then we act it has a consequence and I state that has also a consequence for our nation in terms of our practice capital our artistic capital and what's owned by the nation now I only knew about this yesterday because I was um judging an award with a curator from the National Gallery and they said oh you know so and so oh wow he like had to retire from somewhere because he uh dealt inappropriately with his students so this is a photographer who did this series which some of you may know his wife is the woman in the white shirt here and he did a series of the brown sisters across time it's very famous but he also made the most exceptional pictures of his family he's a very fine photographer and I was amazed amazed I knew nothing of this that colleague he's a curator could tell me that happened in 2018 and his name is Nicholas Nixon and I till that time had revered his work do I still revere his work yes I do can I separate Nicholas Nixon from the work yes I can because my retrospective understanding doesn't actually change what Nicholas Nixon has done as an older man he's dealt inappropriately not he's done stupid things offensive things suggestive things to his student and he was asked to retire early he hasn't done anything illegal he hasn't raped anyone or molested anyone he's just been ridiculous and pathetic but do I still revere his work yes I do and this person's already been mentioned Guernica one of the most powerful anti-war statements ever made made by a man who's all the things that have been mentioned previously and so how does that affect our perspective of Guernica and for me it's enough to know that he was dodgy but it actually doesn't affect how I look at that art and the power of that art thank you thank you Denise and now our first speaker for the negative team Dr Kim Corneo give him a round of applause make him feel welcome hey thanks Dan and thanks Denise I mean I must say Denise it is so disturbing to see these things and I think we have a serious side and I might partly look at it but I might partly not as well because I think we also need to have a little bit of fun so to separate or to not well I wanted to start by thinking of the history of art and artists wanting to get their names out is a history we should acknowledge and really be triumphant about because in my field of music we had music for a long long time that no one got to put their name to and I'm going to give you an example of it okay that's a short example of Gregorian chant and you know we might chill out we might think this is really beautiful but really what happened is for a thousand years in the early history of Christianity no one could put their name on art it was owned by the state let's think about what that means right you might have the impulse to make something to try and make something better to try and comment on the world but someone actually says that what you do is subservient to what they want and so on some level we have to argue that the artist has to exist to enable the canary in the coal mine the people to say that there must be better there must be greater so we've seen what happens when it's wrong but so often it is right isn't it and I just wanted to tell you a little story about how the the way that we got music to be preserved was through this weird guy called Guido de Arezzo and he's a bit like some of the people we've talked about he wrote in around about the 1030s he said well I had to invent music notation because it took me so long beating the children to teach them Gregorian chant I had to find a different way to enable music to be taught so he invented he invented the solfege and he invented a stave with music on it and so while this weird guy invented this thing he enabled something amazing to happen which was the composer came into being and where those composers started ladies and gentlemen was actually at the Cathedral of Notre Dame so I want us to think about that so the rise of in music of the artist of what we say can actually enable us as a culture to say individuals do exist they have points of view they can make this world a better place was by two guys called Leonon and Pettitone who are basically they were they're sort of like monk warriors in a sense because they basically wrote this music and they got together a professional music practice at the Cathedral of Notre Dame and allowed all the music we have had since to exist it's an amazing thought I mean I get really inspired to think about that then I'm going to cut a long time later to a guy who you've probably all heard of called Mozart sir what was Mozart so good at well he came into a world also where artists didn't get to exist where the artist wasn't separated in a sense he had to make his living when he was young both by teaching music and being the sort of performing you know little kid but then he did these things when he was young he wrote what was called insert arias now insert aria is the equivalent of writing really bad jingle music today and so he'd write it into the operas of other people who seem to be famous at the time but what happened they became not famous and Mozart's insert arias became some of the greatest moments of musical history while the people he wrote for completely died so we we can actually say that Mozart has made the case for us as a person very very strongly that we have to preserve the work of individual artists and I'm going to play a little example if we're ready we're going to listen to a little bit of a piece not by Mozart but the piece that he had a very important thing to do with let's press play can we go a bit later otherwise I'll have to sing it for you and there's a big boy soprano solo you don't want to hear that do people know this work Allegra is misery mate now the pope decided this work was so spiritually powerful that humans should only be able to hear this once a year it was actually generally done twice in a year and it was locked away under lock and key by the papal authorities and Mozart when he was 14 said enough is enough this piece of art is made by a person it's part of our new secular society he was getting even as a kid into these notions that we all have today of the enlightenment of us actually craving for a libertarian equality society and he said I will actually get this piece out so he smuggled in pen and paper listened to it once and read the whole thing out 15 minutes of music note for note isn't that audacious that's what he did to enable art to survive with artists so it's pretty amazing to think about that and now I wanted to actually pick up my little guitar if that's all right because I thought it's important if we're talking about art that we have a bit so I have a little song and I thought how could I really make our case because really as we know there is no case the truth is that this is so nuanced and so scary we have to think about everything to do with human nature and we have to say that everyone not just the great artists all of us have a dark side as the Dalai Lama said basically all of us suffer the four noble truths of the Buddha say all of us suffer and if we're not very careful we make others suffer in response to that suffering so here's a little song I don't think I've ever played on one leg before if I fall over I hope it's okay what about all this hard stuff you play the ball of a man especially when the bloke is a sleaze you might not still be a fan it makes me think about roth mate and how he painted the queen he wouldn't listen to the wobble board without me losing me green I'm in a rush to see Jeffrey know that will not be fine so he can't go down he can't go down spot he can't go down and the moral to this little story is very easy to see separate the artist from the art and Ralph Harris may be free so before I go I want to give you one more word gesundumswerk Wagner total art total creation an amazing thought this is a man who made was able to design an opera house with the best acoustics that had been seen where you could get an orchestra of like 110 people to play underneath one soloist so you get this incredible total art drama that Wagner wrote and for example one of his most famous areas was it's really big right but what happened when you read about Wagner and anti-semitism what happened ladies and gentlemen bye bye thank you kim it's been a while since I heard Ralph Harris also I'm a bit confused about what team kim is on now let's invite someone from the affirmative team to respond Dr Robert Wellington senior lecturer for the center of art history and theory please make him very welcome well thank you everybody that's a that's a I'm very loud so hopefully I won't have to bend down to this microphone it's a very difficult act to follow and I'm sure you're going to be very grateful actually that I won't be singing if you heard me sing but my argument tonight and I hope you can see this down low here is a very simple one not only can the work of art be separated from the artist it in fact it usually is and this is especially true if we take a longer historical view of the work of art and as an art historian who's interested in long histories and deep histories of art and the things that artists have been inspired by over millennia in many cultures I can't help but think about ancient Rome 10 million tourists visit ancient Rome each year and around four million of those tourists will go to the Vatican now we're not going to get into the politics of ethics of the Vatican tonight but we will think a little bit about the ethics of Roman society a society that took great glee in the public slaughter of people and yet a society that was able to produce works of such exquisite beauty that we swoon in front of them when we go to see them at least I do and I try and make my students sometimes too and I'm showing you here one work here's an idea the Apollo Belvedere dug up in Rome in the 16th century this work here goes on to be one of the most inspirational works of art for artists from the 18th century 19th century 20th century on do we know the name of the author do we know the name of the maker of this sculpture sculpture no in fact this is a sculpture produced in the first century AD by Roman craftsmen after a piece made by an ancient Greek maker and we think it's only supposition that we know the name of this person anyone in the audience like to tell me the name of the person who made the first bronze version of this famous sculpture no not Donatello indeed it is uh Leo Charis anybody heard that name before I hadn't either and this is what I work on right so either I'm a terrible historian or there's something to be said about the work of art being separated from the artist I'm going to take you now this was an opportunity for me to infuse about one of the things I really love every time I'm very fortunate I come from England every time I go to London I have to make a special visit to the Victoria now book museum to see the artable carpet and the artable carpet is to me one of the finest pieces of creation by human hands it's a work of such exquisite beauty that I am happy to wait that 20 minutes until the little dark lights come on so I can closely at the sum 300 to 350 knots per square inch that were tied together by artisans in 16th century Safavid Iran artisans who's like we have never seen since and will never see again people who can make works of such stunning complexity uh in veneration of culture that it doesn't matter where we come from or who we are um we gasp when we see them and when we understand that these tiny tiny pixel marks are the result of somebody tying a knot with their own hand think of the years this took to make it's exquisite and it's breathtaking but do we know who the maker was no several makers many makers we've lost them to history so one proposition I would like to suggest as an art historian is that to say to link the work of art solely to the maker to the creative agent is to misunderstand how culture works and to misunderstand how works of art really come to be and I would say that the work of art is created not just by an individual but through a complex and networked process of culture an artist can only make a work of exquisite beauty or a work that touches us or a work that we come back to time and again throughout our lives it can only make that work because the conditions were right for them to make that work the individual person the individual creator doesn't come from nothing none of us come from nothing we are part of a collective culture and here is my little tree of collective culture do artist's intentions matter well the first thing you learn as an art historian and I do remember my rather grim and cross art history teachers telling me that no we cannot reconstruct the intentions particularly of a historical artist and even if an artist does tell us of their intentions of what they wanted to do when they were making a work of art we can't really believe them because perhaps they aren't the best witness to their own practice they don't have the distance necessary and they're not necessarily aware of their own the sort of structures of cultural thought that they're born within they aren't they don't have the distance to understand the complexity of their own culture and here we have a lovely little cartoon for you that makes a makes a bit of pokes a bit of fun at why artists might make a work of art not for the lofty reasons that they might tell us in their gallery blurbs but indeed for other reasons reasons of recognition of being someone in society who holds a certain position and is acknowledged for being excellent in that way so I'm a little ahead of time but I'd like to close by saying if the question were tonight should artists be held to the same moral standards as the rest of society the answer would be clearly a big yes and I put it in big bold points so that you can see I agree with this idea that we should check the morals of our artists but it's not our question tonight our question tonight is can and should the work of art be separated from the artist and the answer as my friend on the opposing team Kim has helped you to helps us to show is that in fact we do regularly separate the work of art from the artist and that's how culture works thank you very compelling thank you Robert we next have in response on the negative team Dave Caffrey who is the producer of the brilliant art not a part festival among many many other hats he wears I believe he may have brought something along for us tonight as well I'll let him explain Dave welcome please make him welcome he's Anne it's a pleasure to be here let me just get this right great it's tough being an academic sometimes no actually I'm really I'm really intimidated by the situation but but hey it's fun so we're going to funk it up a bit there is no doubt of course that an artwork should be able to stand by itself we've got one here it's standing up by itself and without the author jumping into you without the intention of what it should mean meaning of course is heterogeneous meaning changes and is dynamic perhaps that rugs meaning will change if we knew the the background of the artist and we don't so the that perhaps is not a appropriate example when we are talking about cultural issues of today and whether or not we should be supporting idols and the let's be honest disgusting abuse that many of them have been doing into contemporary society at a time when we are trying to stamp that out but there are many layers of meaning and the artist comprises some of those layers of the artwork not all of them the artwork has many layers you can choose to ignore them but at great social cost may I introduce to you pudica just over here of course the affirmative side wouldn't want you to know what the artist name is or any background but I might give it to you anyway it's by a artist called Miss Klectic who studied here at the ANU and it was recently commissioned by our arts festival the debate might dwell on the negative implications of attaching an artist to the work in the case of Chris Brown of course it should kill the work actually you know I'm just going to deal with the Chris Brown issue right now let's just go there please obviously Chris Brown's a dickhead he talks about bitches as though they are it's his right to hit women he talks about putting them on the street the real question is why do people want to listen to those lyrics in the first place in my opinion people are getting what they look for when they support idiots like that hitting Rihanna is simply walking the talk no one should be listening to him so now we're done with Chris Brown because it's kind of a grace issue when he's a really freaking popular guy and now Justin Bieber is trying to support him no no no he talks about it he did it we shouldn't support it we shouldn't listen to it back to pudica sorry excuse me if we don't reference the artist in our appreciation of an artwork it follows that we would also wouldn't reference the artist's statement and positive layers of meaning to the artist can bring to the work beyond its moment of creation that moment of creation is very special like an act of giving birth and I agree it should be able to stand alone but like the act of birth parental guidance is recommended in the case of pudica the artist has given an eloquent set of guidelines to his interpretation the artist says technically colored plastic is combined with bone white gypsum to summon the symbiotic concepts of beauty and decay life and death pudica takes the shape of both a reef and a female body a mother which gives life the iconography of multiple hands concealing the body referred to the classical art pose of pudica or shame plant where women were depicted as covering themselves which in turn drew the viewer's attention to the very thing they were concealing their sexuality thus creating a notion of shame now have more layers of meaning that I've just read from the artist statement helped you understand this work I'm going to assume it has let's break it down a little bit further because it's actually worth considering this artwork I hope speaks to many of the layers in this conversation the artist of course lives in a time when the largest living organism on the planet is dying the Great Barrier Reef is dying and when women's incessant sexualization is finally being confronted at a global crisis the artworks takes a second meaning this work mixes the two inverting the classical pose of pudica or shameful covering to draw attention to those areas in this case the artist the artworks suffocation bleaching and critical erosion but if you believe the author is dead and that the artist can be truly separated from the artwork then please just forget all those layers of meaning that I've just talked about before you wouldn't believe in reading the artist statements after all you can't have an artist statement without an artist there's a bigger issue at stake here and I'm kind of disappointed my learned colleagues haven't gone into the the essay the death of the author by by Barth the of course a postmodern take is the framework in which a lot of this conversation has has arisen the idea that we can fragment the viewer's perception of a work from its maker in some ways this would empower the viewer to create their own world of interpretation but let's dig into that a little bit further nature of course was the godfather of postmodernism in fact Barth was relying on Nietzsche's idea of Zavildumacht which we may know is interpreted as translated as the will to power but let's let's look at that a bit deeper it's actually the best translation that I came across was the will to force a creation so the idea that we can create our own phenomena the world of interpretation that we have is something that we can empower ourselves of course Barth was pulling on that and said no if we want to we can choose to ignore the artist from this phenomenal or sublime or beautiful feeling that we're getting from art but that doesn't actually take into account Zavildumacht in its entirety Zavildumacht would be to create a world beyond just the barriers that we discover so this is the trick when we discover that Chris Brown has hit reality or that Michael Jackson has fondled seven-year-olds or you know there's been a lot of examples then you can choose to ignore it if you want to you go ahead but the problem that we're creating then is that we have all these idols we have idolized and in contemporary society we are funding these artists do you want to create a society where as the strict definition of postmodernism might support that we can kind of ignore some of these inconvenient facts and that we can support an artwork or a world where we live or do we have a wider appreciation of the world that we're trying to create and under Zavildumacht more formally we should be choosing to eradicate some of those problems in our society so we can actually create a world that we want to live in um a little bit more time that's great I'm just going to finish with a quick little um question because I think that we're just going to ask it straight up I mean sometimes it gets a bit boring and academic such as you know is the artist a layer of significance to the artwork yeah okay we can talk about it but ask differently will you dance to music by a pedophile or to demonize that to use that horrible term a wife beater and will you support their financial benefactors the reason the question should be termed this way is because the artist whether you like it or not is a layer of meaning on any artwork and your choice in today's society to either support a boycott of work is a vote about their acceptability in today's society whether or not they should be paid I know who I don't want to support or encourage the rewards in the future thank you thank you Dave and now our final speaker before we get our juicy rebuttals uh is from our affirmative team Ray Mardia is a lawyer leadership coach and your alumna is she going to sing baby got back I'll let her decide please make a very welcome Ray Mardia hi everyone you guys hear me if I just have one slide so good evening by the way and and throughout my life law literature and leadership all taught me to play with words you know to be try and be emotionally intelligent and to make room for the views of others I can talk about tonight's topic for hours but in the next eight minutes I'll ask you to do just that you know make room for the different facets of this issue I'm arguing for separating art from the artist and the first word of tonight's question can frames it in terms of possibility are we able to separate and I'll try to avoid words like sure don't must because prescribing everyone to feel about art actually feels like an Orwellian nightmare to me you know I've thrown away my Annie Hall DVD and you got to do it too you know if you care about diversity of people and thought this is a wonderful time to live that belief and I'll quickly discuss five frameworks to show you how to separate art from the artist and to keep your hearts open while navigating this issue tonight's second word you is also important you know who am I speaking on behalf of tonight is it all of you in this room is it the world is it you the critic you the artist you the survivor the issue of representation in the me too era is delicate and free speech principles say that you and I can respond differently to the same art because we're different people and so do postmodern thinkers like baths who said that the artist is not only separate from the art but they're dead no you bring your pain your values your wounds and dreams to the art and I do the same so I may separate you may not and realizing the subjectivity of this process allows us to make room for each other both sides of the table and to separate art from the artist the word separate is also really interesting and I see this back and forth between the two teams the first is a critical separation you know is art less good if it's made by a felon or a is art better if it's made by a saint you know and 20th century literary criticism says no the and before that it says that no that the art stands on its own be it Degas Wagner Picasso T. S. Eliot as repound and to modern artists like Woody Allen or Harvey Weinstein many artists with fascist sexist views created beloved works of art the belief here is that the book or song or film transcends the artist because it has the power to speak to humanity directly like Denise showed beforehand the new historicists did sort of shift gears a little bit and said well biographies don't make the art good or bad but it adds meaning like Dave was talking about before and so it encouraged us to see the art in all its complexity you know to know the artist feel the discomfort the awe and to go to new grounds of that relationship between the art and the artist so culturally you'll see that there's precedent for both and keeping that in mind it's you know we can argue that it is possible to separate the art in the artist and to not as well the second kind of separation is a practical one and I feel like this is where a lot of anxiety lies about tonight's topic Dave also mentioned this and you might say well diversity is all great but am I complicit if I separate a misogynist from their art and then continue to consume it those who say yes believe that the pain the artist's cause cancels the joy or the appreciation that we feel for the art and it's a zero sum equation where your moral disgust has to become your aesthetic disgust you know and your attention and money then has to be turned away to support artists who are more virtuous right but but know this the the male gaze can be found in film music art to not be complicit we'd more or less have to stop consuming art overall you know every time I loved a Bond girl admired a nude painting in a gallery laughed at the Mean Girls montage you know or sung the grease soundtrack I may have been complicit in a story that I don't know art made by virtuous artists or women can still normalize the abuse of women because misogyny is in the bones of art and history and culture so while boycotting art is one way to show survivors your support there are others beyond this zero sum equation this isn't about excusing the crime but rather it's about being mindful about the complexities of this issue and to separate the threads and ask ourselves what can I do for survivors what can I do for the art what can I do for the artist what can I do for you what can I do for myself what does each of these people parties require of me and so seeing beyond the zero sum equation when offering support and solidarity is also another way to separate the art from the artist in my case I work with survivors of sexual abuse and domestic violence as part of a lawyer and a coach so letting justice fall and exposing the perps reputation is just one outcome you know clients seek a range of outcomes including apologies undertakings money public attention no attention new opportunities mental health support for them or the other party or legal procedures to name a few um one of my survivor clients told me that Diane Keaton and her costume designer Ruth Hawley made Annie Hall's legacy and to say that it's a Woody Allen film diminishes Keaton and everybody else who worked on it and so that really made me reassess and hear different survivor perspectives on this issue about separating the art from the artist um plus if from a legal perspective if a person is guilty the court draws a boundary and decides a proportionate response that balances the interests of the survivor with the perpetrator any study on recidivism will show you that if you take away someone's work it increases their likelihood to reoffend now that's not pity or an excuse on my part of course we have to make the world safer for survivors but the way or a useful way to do it is to ask them instead of assuming that what they want is my outrage alone no um part of this issue is to also ask what to do with the artist's gift by taking it from them will the survivors heal and will it rob them of what they want or the artists of their purpose and me of the art I love and so it's important to keep testing these assumptions which brings me to my last point you know one of the things I do as a coach is to look out for cognitive biases or distorted thinking and seeing this question as either or is is probably one you know it's probably both and and what I mean by that is that an artist's art reflects something about them at a given point in time but people are complex and no one is one thing uh Louis CK is funny and he masturbated in front of women Kevin Spacey is facing five years in jail and he made some iconic movies you know to borrow a Walt Whitman term artists contain multitudes like you and I and our brain likes labeling because reconciling the light and darkness in anybody is a challenging workout for our hearts but if we give each element its place the crime the art the artist the survivor the human maybe we can begin to work through each one and make true of these multitudes and contradictions that exist in the artists and in ourselves and each other it's like the academy awards but less tuneful isn't it well let's have our final speaker for the negative team that you cannot separate the art from the artist please make a very welcome Dr Monique Rooney senior lecturer in English literature and convener of the screen studies major for a new college of the arts and social silence sciences give her a big round of applause thank you can everyone hear me I have three slides so oh just oh chestnut tree great rooted blossom are you the leaf the blossom or the bowl a body swayed to music a brightening glance how can we know the dancer from the dance William Butler Yates's poem asks whether we can know the dancer apart from the dance but also in the way that poet poetry can it asks us to consider whether dance in fact gives us the dancer taking a very brief look back in history before returning to the present day I insist that we cannot know the artist apart from the artwork sure we can discern instances where artists have attempted separation ultimately however artists fail in this attempt in the face of public appetite to know the artist behind art George Elliott is the masculine pseudonym of the female novelist who wrote the great 19th century novel Middlemarch with the male authorship deterring readers from automatically making stereotype assumptions about her fiction Mary Ann Evans the real life artist behind the pen name also wished to keep certain aspects of her life private despite this wish to at least partly separate herself from her creative input output there are now in circulation print and screen biographies that detail the serious the scandalous and the gossipy when recounting her life the television biopic George Elliott a scandalous life was one product of our fascination with the author and the novel there is post death however no living author available to correct the written record as a result the question of how artists connects to artwork dancer to dance becomes endlessly conjecturable multiplying speculations about an artist artwork nexus that can never truly be disentangled sorry Hollywood grips Hollywood star Greta Garbo is another famous woman who wanted to keep her private life just that private I want to be left alone is a sentence one of Garbo's onscreen characters uttered the actor herself stated that she was able to express herself only through her roles not in words and that is why she tried to avoid talking to the press despite Garbo's own insistence on the inextricable link between actor and character she struggled to keep actors hungry for news from her door hundreds of biographies biopics newspaper and magazine articles have since her death in 1990 wanted to know the Garbo behind the image online speculation now joins these pursuits a google search of Garbo's name reveals Garbo's name reveals she is the leading entry in one of the internet's top 20 reclusive celebrity lists but do online and other searches ever find a Garbo separate from the screen artifact the philosopher Roland Bart once said that Garbo generated in viewers a kind of ecstasy to look at Garbo's face Bart said is to lose oneself in a mystical image that has the effect of a love potion on the viewer strong language the desire to know Garbo continues based as it is on the hopeless hope that one can know a woman distinctly from the mysterious words and images that she left behind Garbo is an excellent example of how we will relentlessly seek biographical information no matter how often the artist says she wants to be left alone the stakes of such a situation have only increased in both scale and intensity in the context of our digital media sphere where the possibility of separating artists from art is now well-nigh well-nigh non-existent take international literary star Eleanor Farante for example who like George Elliot before her publishes her fiction under a pen name the blockbuster success of her four-volume Neapolitan series has given birth to Farante Truthes who are fans that hunt for the real identity behind the pen name it was journalist Claudio Gatti who tracked down a woman named Anita Raja citing financial records and royalty payments as evidence for his discovery that Raja is the author behind the Farante pen name the online world with its archives of personal records and immediately shareable data presents hazards for artists wanting separation from their art and it is the living rather than just the dead who are vulnerable to intense scrutiny and exposure in our digital age but surely death that great leveler remains the final boundary where other attempts fail surely find death finally separates the star from her curious fans the author from his readers insatiable appetite for personal news in truth however fans normally know a star because of her screen presence or an author because of his fiction knowledge of the artist does not exist without the artwork and death further cements and intensifies rather than severs the desire to know the art artist through artwork consider those celebrated artists whose early deaths generated further fame the 27 Club is the name for a group of artists including Janice Joplin Robert Johnson Jimmy Hendricks Amy Winehouse who were either struck down or died by their own hand at age 27 musician Kurt Cobain was one such artist Cobain's suicide 25 years ago generated a veritable industry comprising biographies biopics and online debate all of which have speculated about Cobain and in particular his motivations for his death I hope you will forgive me for concluding my case for why we can never truly separate art from the artist by dwelling on this morbid topic topic of death just a little bit longer I turn finally to an example beautifully demonstrating the entanglements of the dancer with the dance the impossibility of separating artists from our object this performance followed the awful events in the Christchurch Mosque and one nation senator Fraser Anning's comments while responding to reporters questioning him about those incendiary remarks Anning was struck on the back of the head by an egg the perpetrator a 17 year old teenager called William Connolly shot to worldwide fame when live videos of the event went viral now known simply as egg boy Connolly was within 24 hours labeled hero of the earth with an artist creating and distributing this image of him the video of egg boy striking the senator is also a work of art it shows the teenager like a dancer swooping in and then keeping his balance while live recording with his iPhone as Anning hits back at him this performance art is I propose to you a moment of hope it is a dance that cannot be separated from its egg boy dancer the fame of whom is now interlinked via these two artworks with the former US president thank you what a great angle to take it to and come at it from the inextricable link of the artist and the art that's what we're talking about we've heard our arguments in full and now there's a chance for each of our teams to give a very short rebuttal now that we've heard each side it's a two minute one make it short and sharp are you ready Denise hit it so now I can concentrate I really thank my esteemed my dearest esteemed colleague Kim because his argument is spot on art was owned by the state and in most respects it still is it's now owned by a state we call society it's owned by our collective consciousness our collective memory as multiple parties actually own art art that is made for public consumption which is how we're defining art um you know lots of people own it it is as Robert said the work is a product of culture and shared consumption we make that work shared belonging collective memory make the art that you and I consume and appreciate and that's what it is so the work is already shared and that as Robert said is how culture our culture works you are dancing to music you are looking at images and those things are by unknown people you might know who they are you do not know what they are thank you in response for the negative team Kim Cuneo I'll get Denise over lunch next week but but in the meantime what did Denise say actually well there's been all this bad stuff we have to get over it you know we could say it was a really a mate I mean I love the images but that's what we got yes people are bad and we'll get over it and then Rob sort of said well it's always been yeah you know I go off and I see it and that's just again how it is so that we have this proposal like do we accept the status quo and then we get from radio really beautiful guidebook on how to make it work for us but really is that what we want don't we want to say no I want to say no actually I want to say no to saying I really like Wagner when you get five minutes of good music in four hours of opera I think it's a lot of shit but the five minutes are incredible but the thing is you see I'm Jewish and I'm Jewish and I grew up and I used to actually serve the old guys who survived Auschwitz food when they had backgammon and when I talked to them about Wagner they reviled and the truth came out and they had to revile when Baron Boehm actually said I'm going to conduct Wagner because that's what a state does but some people never ever ever recovered when Wagner was played that's just the reality and I think the truth will always rise yes we can say for some period of time we can hold it back but inevitably the stories the people to somehow come out I mean the great example for me is on Sonsucchi let's think about her in the 1990s under house arrest she was held up as the next Mandela but then we she actually always was anti the people she was anti she wrote about it she spoke about it but then we wised up when the atrocity happened why didn't we wise up when it was happening because of the academic and intellectual laziness that society implores us to do let's just say this is art when we forgive art we forgive politicians we forgive murderers we forgive everything over time what we have to say is time is up to stand up for what is good and not let it happen anymore thank you thank you Dr Kim and now to respond for the affirmative team Dr Robert Wellington thank you thank you very much to my colleagues and to the wonderful speakers on the panel against us we've heard actually from the panel against us lots of arguments to support our case as I'm sure you'll agree Kim has pointed to a terrible contemptible man who invented musical notation imagine a world without musical notation imagine a world without Mozart no thank you Dave has spoken about the death of the author one of the most powerful pieces of writing of the last 70 years let's say that tells us truly in fact from a Hegelian standpoint that culture is collectively authored culture isn't something that an individual actor an agent can decide upon and can have agency over once you start talking about the individual agency of an artist and particularly when that individual agency of artist is put to a political purpose we're in very very dangerous territory and lastly Monique has given us some wonderful examples of recuperative histories histories of women in literature and film who we've learnt more about after the fact and we've come to learn and enjoy now recuperative history is part of a cultural movement of our time the idea of recuperative history and feminist scholarship is located historically and socially in our time and it's through this collective authorship and this collective culture that we've come to do things like rediscover wonderful women writers who had previously had to hide their identities so I would like to end by reaffirming my point which is simply that we usually do separate the work of art from the artist and in fact I haven't really heard any arguments to the contrary boom and in response see if you can give that to Robert Dave Caffrey for the negative team in your rebuttal thank you this has been a lot of fun it looks let's get a bit practical here yes it's fine to say that we're all collective authors and that the the world of art that we're going to keep creating is created by everybody but let's not encourage and justify pedophilia and domestic violence please I would like for us to be a collective author towards a positive future that does not support the problems that at the moment if we were to separate the author from the work we would be celebrating that work and as as been discussed therefore celebrating layers of that work which are the artist and the values of the artist we don't want to celebrate those values but there of course the the other side is we don't know a censure all of great art I think the the answer here is to to frown upon and remember that the artworks that we may reference it's fine to reference them it's not saying we should get rid of them completely but we should remember that they are loaded with things that we do not want to continue into the future and therefore we should not socially justify thank you Dave oh thank you Dave and now our final speaker for the affirmative team please make a welcome in her rebuttal Ray Maria I want to thank everybody on both sides of the panel because this side of the table you know certainly has a lot of overlap with some of the things we're discussing just appears that our interpretation is different and this is really the heart of what tonight's topic is about I agree with Dave that there are many layers of meaning when it comes to the artist and the beauty of this conversation about separating the art and the artist belongs to all of us and so the minute art becomes prescriptive we enter into this space where art becomes political it becomes a form of indoctrination where I tell you what you can and cannot do and how you must interact with the things that you love the way that you feel about the people who inspire and impact you it's also to to argue that nowhere in our arguments have we condoned the crime or excused the crimes or created the aesthetic alibi you know the art excusing the crime it's really to expand our consciousness about the complexities of this issue and to see that there are different threads and to have the awareness and the humility to make room for each other as we try and navigate all the different aspects of this of this topic so I want to urge all of you to do that I definitely have room for everything that my opponents have said tonight and all I ask is for us to make room for each other as we move forward with this topic thank you an olive branch from our final speaker let's see if uh manik can destroy that olive branch with her rebuttal our final rebuttal tonight please make a very welcome destroy the microphone instead thank you so according to robert our team has supported their side um however our teams started with a song by kim that we all immediately recognized as um a play on a song by rove harris so immediately we got um a song that cannot be separated from its singer and we also had from dave this nichien idea about the will to power and the will to change um you know some of the malicious things and some of the difficult abuse questions that are going on in our society and that it's possible to do that collectively um the affirmative team did want to come back to the collective continuously um denise talked about a collective consciousness uh robert talked about uh culture and culture is what makes art and um there is no way of getting around that and ray talked about the law and different ways of addressing and negotiating what is a complex system that is built of a collective but i'm here to remind you that culture collective consciousness the law these things are made up of artifacts they're made up of artists they're made up of singers and they're made up of thinkers who are a singular we don't have this collective unless we can come back to that singularity and the point that i wanted to keep reminding you is that we can um draw attention to people and to beings that are behind the art but we can't separate the artist from the art the artist is actually a word that refers to the art just as the word dancer refers to the dance and singer refers to the sing to the song um so given i'm a literary person you might guess so given that entanglement of words it's extremely difficult to ever and i propose to you that it's impossible to separate the artist from the art thank you keep that applause going can we just thank all of our speakers tonight amazing arguments and now before i add some final comments it's time for you to decide have we solved it can you separate the art from the artist i'm gonna ask you to show me in just a moment by a way of applause so make sure that you really know who you think's one because i know that you've all figured it out by now um and we'll decide the winner of this debate can you separate the art from the artist the affirmative say yes who agrees with them can you not separate from the artist are they always inextricably linked the negative say who agrees with the negative team oh i think the negative have it one more round of the pause i thought that the affirmative team argued their case incredibly well robert i thought that your point on the artist's intentions and whether or not they actually matter was really pertinent i think that from your gaze and we all come from this from a very individual point of view you know we all engage with culture in a different way robert your engagement with culture is very much from hundreds of years ago my engagement from culture as you heard in my opening monologue is very much in contemporary music and i think that that idea of time is a huge factor the things that happened a long time ago happened a long time ago the things that happened three months ago are burned in our memory and we're reacting in a very different way uh denise i was curious when you mentioned and showed the beautiful pictures from gogan and caravaggio did anybody know those stories and are you going to look at those paintings differently the next time you go to the national gallery i wonder that if that will change it what are the voices that are silenced as well as a question that i have and there are so many questions this sort of stem off of this conversation it's very nuanced for all of the people who abuse their power the often male artists who had a position of power and silence the voices of women of people of color of people who weren't as rich of them what of those voices where are they in this conversation there's a lot that i picked up on in this i really loved how ray said basically to quote a great great taco ad why can't we have both um because that's how i feel we can have both and to to look at the full picture is not to be complicit in what that artist has done it's impossible to unhear that song to unread that book and on an emotional level it's impossible to unlove that artwork that you loved before you found out what that person had done in making it or as a part of their life when they made it the tentacles of this conversation do reach further this as i said is part of a patchwork filled with gray areas and i think it's something like all debates that we should keep questioning keep talking about uh and again i think as you've shown in these instances it's very much a case by case basis you can't just say yep you've got to separate the art from the artist or no you can't it's always different um and this is a beginning of a set of questions that i hope that you take with you you know what does this mean for the artist what does it mean for the victims what does it mean for the culture that we've left behind whether it's hundreds of years ago or two months ago and what about i think most importantly the culture that we make in the future that we're all part of the new history critical thinking on art has always been fluid there's been a a handful of philosophers and critical thinkers that have been referenced tonight and i really think that each era celebrates and interrogates art in a different way so in the context of kind of what this debate is framed around this me too movement and this new era of thinking maybe that can be part and add to the layers of what we already have plenty to think about thank you so much for being here what an amazing turnout on a thursday night i mean you could be drinking beers out there but you're here you're asking questions and i hope that you got something out of this tonight please give another big round of applause for our two teams tonight and for yourselves thank you for being such a great audience thank you