In the Morgan Freeman to marry his step granddaughter thread, someone said:
I thought this was interesting, as I’ve heard of people doing this, also with Roman Polanski. Do you guys do it, too?
Me, I don’t. I figure if I did, there’d be way too many people who I’d have to leave off. Even though I think what they did is creepy, I guess there’d be too many awesome things I’d have to stop listening to or watching or reading. No Wall of Sound, no Ike and Tina Turner, no Rosemary’s Baby (well, to be fair, I didn’t care about the movie since I’m hooked on the book). What do you think?
Well, I don’t follow celebrity gossip anyway, so it’s kind of a moot point. But no, I’m never going to meet them, nor does my enjoyment or non-enjoyment of their work affect them (especially if rented or obtained by other means). So I wouldn’t stop watching perfectly good films because of their stars’ personal lives, though I could understand why someone might be unable to enjoy a movie after finding stuff out.
As a rule I try to avoid learning anything about personal about artists/writers/actors/etc to avoid this very issue. I don’t want to judge their work by any standards except what’s in the work.
I think people who boycott art based on things they know about the creator’s personal life are fooling themselves because they aren’t taking into account all the shit they don’t know about the people they are “supporting.”
That being said, I refused to buy any Michael Jackson albums while he was alive, so it’s not a hard and fast rule.
Every seventeen days, Der Trihs writes something that precisely matches my thoughts on a subject. I often wonder what the mechanism behind this is. Right now, though, I will just wait for the 28th and see what happens.
Do I make an intellectual decision to boycott a performer/writer/etc. because of their personal life? Can’t remember a case where I have. HOWEVER, I do know that knowledge of such *can *interfere with my ability to enjoy their work. Two cases in point: Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson, both actors I enjoyed for many years. When they started showing the crazy, I found it hard to watch them without that information intruding and ruining the experience, even in movies I’d seen before. It’s not that I make a declaration that I will never watch/read/listen to XYZ again, it’s just that I know I can’t enjoy their work any longer.
Under some circumstances, yes. I won’t give Orson Scott Card another chance, for example, based on both my dislike of Ender’s Game AND my opinion that Card is a cretin. And I absolutely refused to buy tickets for the Cleveland Indians a few years back when they signed the execrable John Rocker.
Like Der Trihs, I like keeping artists at a distance so that their issues don’t infringe on my enjoyment of their endeavors. (Though I know too many poets for my attempts to work there.)
No, I don’t. It’s completely irrelevant to the work of art. Though I might avoid enriching them in my use of their art, for instance, I have no paid for a Metallica anything since they sued their own fans at the height of their career and mega-wealth.
No. I suppose I might avoid purchasing an artist’s work if he or she was in the habit of donating money to a cause I abhorred, but other than that, I don’t care what people do in their private lives.
I generally don’t care enough to try and find out about artists’ personal lives, but if something that does severely bug me about them comes to my attention, I have little issue with avoiding their work in the future. There’s enough art and entertainment in the world that I don’t feel any need to try and enjoy the output of one artist despite my feelings for the person who produced it when there’s so much out there I haven’t read/watched/listened to yet.
I’m gonna say: pretty much no, I don’t. I am loath to say I never do, because sure as heck there is someone I’m forgetting. But in general, I don’t care. I watch Tom Cruise and often like him. I am not interested in the personal lives of my entertainers. I don’t care who they vote for, what religion or pseudo-religion they are part of, I don’t care who they are doing it with. All I really ask is that they entertain me.
That only works if art is purely a consumer product to you. If you are seeking stuff with a deeper meaning sometimes you have to go with that produced by some creepy people.
The German composer Richard Wagner was a well known anti-Semite, though his family has denied this. Adolf Hitler was a great fan of his, and there is some debate whether Hitler’s most anti-Semitic views came before or after he started listening to Wagner
You could argue that there’s enough art being produced by non creepy people, though. I don’t mind reading or watching stuff by the creeps but there IS a lot of stuff out there.
I don’t avoid work from people who have negatives in their personal lives.
However, I may seek out work from people who have positives in their personal lives. But that’s usually only because that “positive” is what brought them to my attention, rather than any reflection on the positivity itself.
I’ve never made a concious decision to the effect, but find myself shunning musical artists with self-destructive tendencies, while gravitating towards musicians who lead wholesome, balanced lives despite being celebrities. Based on this, I stay away from Janis Joplin, Sid Vicious or Bon Scott and feel all fanboyish to the guys in Rush, Sparks, PF etc. Boring guys in their 60’s who play tennis, raise kids or just concentrate on recording their 30th album and still look good (I do listen to AC/DC, though - I prefer Johnson to Scott).
Nothing is easier than to destroy oneself. Losers destroy themselves. I guess it boils down to this.