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Yeah - 'We don't like Mcdonalds' can sometimes = 'We don't like those poor people and the places they eat.' It needn't do, of course, and usually doesn't if there's a serious reason for person's dislike of McD's, such as their treatment of staff, aninmals, etc.
Why doesn't biography influence your veiws on art? surely an artists background and veiws are an essential part of the context within which the art is veiwed? art doesn't exist in a vacuum, and nor should it.
Well, first you'll find that an awful lot of artisitic traditions - in fact most of the good ones - have absolutely no regard for the artists' 'views', and instead focus on perfecting a kind of ideal form: so Greek statues, Egyptian wall paintings, that sort of thing (although this is a generalisation). The idea of the individual artists' point of view - their subjectivity - being important arises at some point during the capitalist epoch, so is quite recent; and even in things like lyric poetry (Donne, Marvell, Shakespeare) the speaker in the poem is to a large degree a kind of personae - the Tragic Lover or the Machiavellian Revenger, and so on - rather than being the individual writer's thoughts and feelings (although these may play a part).
So there's that. There's also the fact that most people who managed to create beautiful things got up to some rather disgusting behaviour, or lived in a time remote from ours so that we can't help disagreeing with them to some extent. Yet the value of the things they produced remains.
Not much of which pontificating, I have to say, applies to Morrisey, who is certainly small beer compared to Donne, but I do like the aesthetic and the tunes. It wouldn't be as terrible a sacrifice to stop listening to Morrisey because one feels that he thinks some rot, as it would be to stop reading Baudelaire because he was probably cruel and unusual to lots of people.
I would like to reiterate that apart from them usic, Morrisey, as an authority on immigration, = crock of shite. |
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