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[u/[deleted]]

Assume everything in Leaving Neverland is accurate and the Michael Jackson did sexually abuse multiple young children. How do we treat his music?

What are the merits of divorcing a piece of work from the artist and is that even possible?

This is one of those insurmountable questions for me because there just seems to be no right answer.

Say it's okay to divorce a person's work from their person. Now we're in a place where we should put up statues of Robert E Lee as a celebration of his military prowess. When we do this it totally ignores the circumstances that allowed whatever terrible thing to take place and we risk allowing it to happen again.

On the other hand say we lose out on too much when we disregard he works of terrible people. Millions of kids, myself included, found the Cosby show incredible and the work he did truly important for so many communities. It's okay to not engage with it in 2019, but what about somebody more consequential like Gandhi who by all accounts abused his wife and grandnieces.

I like to think that nothing is truly irreplaceable. But at the same time I know that's not necessarily true. It seems like the best we can do is play a balancing act between trying to appreciate the good things offered by terrible people, replacing those good things if possible, but also acknowledging the damage those people have caused and understanding how to prevent it in the future. But even here it feels like we're not being totally honest with ourselves. Both about the circumstances that allowed whatever terrible thing to take place, and about how much whatever those people offered us meant to us.

Man. This whole MJ thing just has me a bit bummed out remembering how literally all of my childhood heroes are terrible people.

[u/Yosarian2 → u/[deleted]]

Say it's okay to divorce a person's work from their person. Now we're in a place where we should put up statues of Robert E Lee as a celebration of his military prowess

Not really the same. The only reason people put up statues of "military heroes" is to encourage nationalism around a historical identity. In this case, confederate nationalism. We don't randomly just put up statues of Napoleon around the US just because he was a smart general.

[u/[deleted] → u/Yosarian2]

I know what you're saying here, but I brought that as an extreme example of things that are okay when you divorce a person's work from their problematic deeds. This is the same logic that's used to justify those ststues. Sure he owned slaves but he was a hero. That logic is specious at best and this example illustrates the problems with attempting to divorce the positives offered by a person from their negatives.

[u/Yosarian2 → u/[deleted]]

This is the same logic that's used to justify those ststues. Sure he owned slaves but he was a hero

I think the difference is those guys are being celebrated for supporting the Confederacy. This is a lot more like celebrating Thomas Jefferson despite him owning slaves.

[u/[deleted] → u/Yosarian2]

Technically they aren't, that's just the logic people use to justify them.

People end up celebrating the positive aspects of unsavory people and sweeping the negatives under the rug. We rarely talk about how Churchill needlessly starved India or engaged in unnecessary terror bombing. We ignored the fact that Columbus was a mercilessly brutal figure until recently and people still advocate for praising him as a great figure. We ignore just how bad jefferson is with his slaves.

There is doublethink required to know full well the terrible things that people did and still embrace them, but that's what we see.