@janbb “But don’t you see a difference when both the alleged perpetrator and the alleged victims are still alive?”
I know this wasn’t addressed to me, but I wanted to respond – I don’t, personally see any difference whether the people involved are alive or dead. If I’m going to be appalled enough by Bill Cosby’s actions to stop watching his TV show, I should have exactly the same reaction to an artist who did the same two hundred years ago.
Still, it’s rare for me to refuse to engage with an artist’s work because of their personal behaviour. I just think it’s an unfair standard to set. I know and expect that many artists have troubled minds – this is sometimes what leads them to become artists in the first place. It’s hypocritical of my to say I care what a small handful of artists have done, while refusing to investigate the lives of any other artist whose work I’ve engaged with.
I think I would still enjoy The Cosby Show if I were watching it in rerun, but luckily for me, I’d lost interest long before the rape allegations. I have absolutely no interest in seeing him perform now, just as I don’t ever want to hear/see another Jian Ghomeshi interview, but I think this is because of what @Seek described – what they do is utterly entwined with their personal life experiences. For me, I think it comes down to not being able to trust what they say to be true anymore. So much of what they perform comes from talking about themselves; if they’re hiding a vast, dark part of themselves, what’s left is just not worth watching.
With Woody Allen, his films are always self portraits of one kind or another, so I expect him to fall into this category. However, he wouldn’t lie in the same kind of way. He cannot help but expose himself on screen, always. He cannot help but conceal himself on screen, always. That’s part of what makes his films so interesting, and whether or not he has done what he’s been accused of, these things will always be true. His crime would not be a betrayal of his art, in the ways that Cosby’s and Ghomeshi’s have.