Confusing The Art and the Artist

It’s one of the classic mistakes, isn’t it? The quality of the art has no dependence on the character or personal qualities of the artist, right? It’s entirely possible for a complete bounder and an utter cad to be a brilliant and gifted writer, who can produce sterling prose that informs the mind and touches the heart, isn’t it? Actually, that’s not a question; I’m sure that it is. The converse, of course, is also true–that wonderful, brilliant people are entirely capable of producing utter dreck. This is perhaps more obvious.

So why is it that sometimes knowing things about some authors makes it hard for me to enjoy their work? Shouldn’t I be able to maintain a mental separation between art and artist? (And again, the converse is true: why is it that knowing things about other artists makes me enjoy their work more?)

I think it’s just down to human nature–the same factor that makes us forgive our friends things that we would castigate others for, or makes us lose patience with people we dislike over things that should be trivial. The evaluation of the art is always happening a context, and part of that context–whether it makes sense or not–is the mental image of the author.

(Sometimes, of course, you don’t have a mental image of the author. Since these images can be both pro and con, I guess you get a more objective read in those cases).

So let’s just take it as read that we should be able to keep art and artist separate, but that in practice we (or at least I) can’t.

I first noticed this a while back, when I found out that an author whose books I had generally quite enjoyed was both a gun nut and the kind of guy who would repeatedly call games that gave the dealer (i.e. himself) an advantage when playing at a dealer’s choice table. (Yeah, I know: poker, killer instinct, taking all the advantages, etc. It still just says “no class” to me.)

I found that when reading his books, I was looking for flaws, or reasons to dislike the books, and I was more ready to reject them. I did end up rejecting one set of books completely, although I still give him a chance on other works. His latest novel was actually quite good, and even with the negative bias going in, I quite enjoyed it–but he was definitely working uphill to convince me.

This sort of “personal knowledge” factor was a pretty rare thing in the days before everyone had a web page, or now a blog. You had to actually meet the authors and have some kind of personal interaction to find out things that didn’t come from the art, and that was pretty rare.

Now, though, everyone and their goldfish has a blog or some kind of online presence, and it’s especially common among SF/F genre writers. You have many, many opportunities to see the artist “speak” not through their art, and much more about their personas becomes available to the audience.

Obviously this will work out both for the good and the bad, as some audience members will be attracted to the displayed personality, some will be repelled, and some just won’t care. And some authors will work very hard at crafting a public persona that attracts the maximum number of readers, while hiding (or at least omitting) potentially objectionable facets of themselves.

Lately, though, I’ve been running into so many on the negative side (at least for me) that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t stop trying to find out about authors all together.

There was finding out that the author of a brilliant series of post-scarcity mad ideas science fiction had converted to annoyingly deep and arational faith (and without even the redeeming benefits of pink lasers from space and gnostic hereseys!), for example. This has pretty solidly biased me against his forthcoming work. (The deathbed conversion is even more abhorrent to me than any other kind–it’s just so obviously an “I am scared and need a happy lie to keep myself warm” thing.) Of course he hasn’t published anything yet that was written post conversion, so I can’t comment on whether or not the quality of the writing has changed, but the bias is already in effect. It’s particularly jarring here, since I the mental image I had of someone who could write those amazing first three books is so at odds with my mental image of the kind of person who would have a life-changing conversion after a close shave with death.

Another one that’s really killing me, is reading this piece by Dan Simmons. Man, I loved Ilium and Olympos, and I’m a pretty big fan of the Hyperion books. Song of Kali was pretty great, too. But after reading that piece, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to enjoy those books again, without the stench of hatred and fear that pervades it polluting my mind. Gah. (I am actually holding out some small hope that this was a Swiftian satire, but reading message board comments like this afterwards isn’t helping.)

(UPDATE: Simmons posts an explanatory message. It might help you–to me he just comes off as incredibly arrogant, and his explanation does nothing to alleviate the problems I had with the first piece. Heart-breaking.)

Of course, as I said, it’s not all negative. Scott & Justine would be great examples of people whose online personas only make it easier for me to enjoy their books. Or Jeff Ford–although his books are so good, I’d probably still be able to enjoy them even if he fell in love with Anne Coulter and became a Scientologist. Or Karl Schroeder. Or… well, I could go on for quite a while, and that’s without even talking about all the authors I know “in real life” whose works I am predisposed to like, because I like the people.

I’m not sure what the conclusion is here. For authors, the obvious conclusion is to be mindful of the potential effect of your online persona on your audience. For me, in the audience, there isn’t as obvious a conclusion. Maybe I just need to reconcile myself again to the fact that the artist and art are different, and try not to be so shocked when an artist reveals himself to be very different from my mental idea of who they are. I’m not sure I can do anything about the related bias question, or even if I should feel like I should do anything about it.