Roseanne Barr has been purged, people are calling for Samantha Bee to be fired, and partisan blood thirst is running high this week. Meanwhile, on Friday, Spotify quietly walked back a new policy implemented earlier this month, censoring artists guilty of “hateful conduct” from its library.
Vowing not to “play judge and jury,” the music platform acknowledged its policy had “created concern that an allegation might affect artists’ chances of landing on a Spotify playlist and negatively impact their future.”
“Across all genres, our role is not to regulate artists,” Spotify said. “Therefore, we are moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct.”
I’m reminded of a line Camille Paglia wrote in February, ruminating on #MeToo. “Great art has often been made by bad people,” she said at the time, referring to the expectation that artists also be good people as “a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism.”
What Roseanne Barr tweeted was racist and stupid. But those attitudes were not reflected in the artistic product she (and her cast and crew and layers of corporate bureaucracy) delivered to viewers. There are no easy answers to these questions, though it’s worth noting the sentiments of Barr’s tweet were immediately drowned out by a chorus of vehement disapproval from almost every corner of the media. Even Bee was greeted with fairly widespread disapproval (though, unlike Roseanne, she didn’t get the ax).
None of this is to say businesses and consumers should endorse people who do bad things. But if we’re on a path to purging all the artists who make bad decisions from society, we may be left with little more than Jimmy Fallon.
Again, there are no easy answers, but the threat of intense public pressure seems an effective deterrent from people airing their racism and misogyny and bigotry in a way that contributes negatively to our culture. And from Barr to Bee, the public has exerted that pressure pretty effectively, extracting apologies from both women and their networks, and using their missteps as teachable moments.
There must be consequences for bad behavior, but perhaps should those consequences shouldn’t always involve reflexively scrubbing away a bad artist’s good art.
