Is this the face of a child molester?
Obviously, we should all stop watching Woody Allen movies if we believe that he molested Dylan Farrow. It therefore follows that if you plan to watch “Blue Jasmine,” you believe that Farrow is lying or the victim of false memories implanted by her mother. Those are your two options. To say that we don’t know whether Farrow is telling the truth and to continue watching Woody Allen movies is to introduce an alarming moral calculus—to measure the quality of “Annie Hall” against the possibility that he molested a child, and then say probably everything is fine. Until we can figure out the truth of Dylan Farrow’s accusations for ourselves, we conscionably can neither watch nor stop watching Woody Allen movies, unless we advance the tenuous argument that art and the artist have nothing to do with each other. Basically we are screwed, is what I am saying here, from both a moral and an epistemological standpoint. That’s also what I say in this consideration of the problem in the Missoula Independent, which is what you get instead of a blog today. Click through, mickey-fickeys.
All scales from 1 to Michael Jackson… well done.
Can the art be separated from the artist? Perhaps when it is convenient for some sort of personal absolution. The truth is though, when it comes to academic scholarship, at least in the fields of musicology, music theory, and most definitely ethnomusicology, the artist is not only obviously connected to his/her art, but scholars and analysts look for and argue to prove these extra musical connections, good, bad, even criminal. Art is the product of that human being and we must acknowledge that connection between the art and it’s producer whether we like it or not. I don’t think; however, that by enjoying a piece of art that we are inherently condoning an artist’s criminal behavior, but all the more recognizing the joys and tragedies of the human condition.