First off, fuck Alice Munro and her selfish gross need to prioritize her child-abusing pedophile husband over her adult child. Fuck that noise. (also a huge fuck you very much to Neil Gaiman, while we’re at it)
Munro was kept in the dark by the men around her about the abuse her child was suffering, because they were worried that if it was made public, the bottom line would suffer.
That’s the real story here. Not her slavish selfish devotion to that monster, yes yes handmaiden of the patriarchy barf. But the fact that silencing child abuse takes a back seat to profit.
I’ve only read one of Munro’s stories, found it deeply unenjoyable, remembered feeling very surprised when she won a Nobel prize, reminded myself that I’ve never enjoyed any Nobel-prize-winning literature, and moved on.
With that out of the way, I want to talk about separating art from the artist, and the angst that has overtaken the English-reading world these days.
“You can’t separate art from the artist! Can you separate Picasso for his art? Imagine being shown a work and not being told it’s a Picasso!” cried one commenter.
It’s interesting that they chose Picasso, because Picasso was made famous by a bunch of wealthy American industrialists and their art critic cronies, who latched on him realising there’s a ton of money to be made here. There are all sorts of talented artists around, some ore talented and some less talented than Picasso, but only one Picasso generates wealth, and that’s not because of his talent with the brush.
That’s it in a nutshell. In modern, post-capitalist Western societies, you cannot separate art from the artist because art is big business, arts sells, and the persona of the artist is part of the business.
And this ties in neatly with the glorification of the individual which is the ideological cornerstone of Eurocentric capitalism. The individual matters, oh they matter so very much. If they write good stories or paint nice pictures, then what they say and think about everything else, who they sleep with, what they eat, all of that matters very much. Everything is all about the individual. (Ironically, in this context, Munro’s decision to stay with the abuser makes perfect sense, as she herself pointed out bitterly to her daughter, since the desires of the individual is all that matters, and it is ridiculous and misogynistic to expect her to sacrifice what she feels like doing to some antiquated unfeminist notion of motherhood).
Humans create art- we have done so very successfully, for millennia. We have told incredible stories (much better ones than Munro, Gaiman and Rowling laid end to end), painted beautiful pictures, built incredible buildings. Some of the best, enduring art in the world is created by nameless, faceless people. Western society would have us believe that art can be only created by special special precious few individuals, and everything they do is important, and worth a lot of money. But that’s not the way we have traditionally and typically created and engaged with art, since ancient times.
We can and should separate art from the artist. Hold the artist accountable, like any human, for their failings and weaknesses, and let’s stop putting these flawed humans on pedestals to worship to line the pockets of their industries.
by 1000andonenites