Aaron Tracy

But we'll have at least asked that question.

That question will be front and center.

That leads me to wonder, how much investigating are we supposed to do?

I've been reading Edgar Allan Poe my whole life.

I didn't know that he married his 13-year-old cousin.

How much responsibility do I have consuming art to really look into the potential really awful, disgusting behavior of the artist?

Yeah.

So, I mean, I don't think that we need to become the like cops and private investigators of the art world.

I think that the questions that the moral life of the artist poses for everyday art consumers are going to be dependent on the kind of information that's part of the public discourse, part of the public domain, the things that we can reasonably expect people to know.

I think that if we thought that there was some sort of strong moral obligation to do investigative work about every artist that we wanted to engage with, not only would that make a lot of art not fun for us, but it would be overly burdensome and not really.

sort of in the spirit in which we often want to engage with the artwork.

I think it would prioritize the moral life of the artist over other kinds of considerations like our aesthetic engagement with their work.

So I think it's really more of a question about given what we know, how should we confront that knowledge, not how much can we go find out about the moral life of the artist.

It feels a little bit dangerous only because it almost feels like you get rewarded by burying your head in the sand.

Choosing not to read the articles that for a while seemingly appeared almost every day in the New York Times about how awful a lot of our artists were.

If you don't look at those, if you don't read those stories, you're going to be able to enjoy a lot more art.

Yeah, it's true.

I mean, I think there are questions we can ask about what people should reasonably know.

And those are broad questions that include this conversation, but all kinds of other things.

And I think sometimes people can be subject to criticism for not being aware of things that it's reasonable for them to know, given how pervasive they are in public discourse and how much attention they've received in the media.