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Can art be separated from the artist? It's a strange question because everything about her is unclear. Who is "man" and what exactly should be separated? The working person from the private person, the written text from the speaking author, the film from the circumstances under which it was filmed?
Nevertheless, the question of the separation between artists and their works is one that is asked again and again. How do you deal with movies whose producer raped women? Or with films whose main actor has beaten his partner? Or with music, in which one can assume that the singer has abused children? Or: Should someone who sympathizes with war criminals get a Nobel Prize?
Art knows no taboos
Often these questions are formulated with a "must": Are you still allowed to watch films by Roman Polanski, Harvey Weinstein or Woody Allen? Can you dance to Michael Jackson, hear R. Kelly, laugh at Louis CK's jokes? May Peter Handke just be considered a great man of letters? Of course you can, purely legal. The question is, is there anything that will affect the consumption of art, its reception, its appreciation, if you know certain things about the people who created them?
For some artists - women artists not included - you feel that at some point they have crossed a magical border beyond which their admirers forgive them every conceivable mistake: jokes at the expense of minorities? Freedom of art, he knows no taboos! Nasty sayings about women? Wonderfully cranky, so funny! Attacks against journalists? An Enfant Terrible! Wife beaten up? Hach, genius and madness! Cuddled with dictators? An obstinate character, a bon vivant who polarizes, an eternal provocateur who does not let anyone tell him anything.
The decision that Peter Handke should receive the Nobel Prize for Literature is quite remarkable. Last year's award was canceled because the Swedish Academy was involved in a variety of scandals, including the harassment and rape of one of its former members' husbands. The Nobel Committee has been reorganized. And now with Handke an author is honored, whom his former partner Marie Colbin accused in 1999 in an open letter to have kicked and beaten her - which Handke the biographer Malte Herwig later also admitted: "I gave her a kick in the ass I think I cut her too, I just wanted to work, and I could not, but it was not good, I did not like myself either. " But is that enough?
Disturbing reactions in the case of Handke
Handke is an author who made extremely derogatory comments about women and #MeToo, an author who admitted to having beaten a critic. An author who said in a conversation with the journalist André Müller that he occasionally "feels very close" to Hitler as a human being, and sometimes he also feels a "deep, perverse sympathy for the fascist violence that comes from despair" , And an author who made a speech at the memorial service for a dictator.
The reactions of those who consider Handke to be a worthy Nobel Prize winner are correspondingly disturbing. The German Minister of Culture Monika Grütters called Handke "one of the most important contemporary German-speaking authors", who "has broken many a political taboo". The literary critic Denis Scheck said: "The political correctness has received a bang slap in the face."
But not only the. "The Nobel Prize for Peter Handke is a slap in the face, not only for the victims of the massacres in Bosnia, it is a slap in the face of all those who believe in human rights and facts," wrote author Jagoda Marinic. "Do those who want to separate work and person mean that the victims of the genocide should do the same?"
To separate art and artists is luxury
How should they be able to do that? When an artist commits, approves, or denies crime, when he makes perpetrators a victim, art and artists are a luxury to be separated from one another. It is a perfidious form of waste separation that takes place where such artists are defended: yes, they have said or done this or that, "lost," "burned," "bogged down," but you have to be away from it all consider literature as such and sort of separate the residual waste from the aesthetically useful. But what if you can not do that? And not because you have no idea about literature, but because you have certain demands on it?
The US Department of Authors' Association PEN has expressed deep regret over Handke's election: "We are speechless about choosing a writer who has used his public voice to curtail historical truths and assist the performers of a genocide."
The winner of this year's German Book Prize Sašsa Stanišsic also criticized the decision: "also because I had the luck to escape from what Peter Handke does not describe in his texts." That I am allowed to stand before you today, I have a reality Thanks to this person has not appropriated. " Handke wrote about Stanišsic's hometown Višsegrad and denied his narrator the crimes against the humanity that happened there.
What are these limits?
It is less the question of whether one can separate art from the artist than the question of who can do that. Because some can apparently quite wonderful. The more reflexive the artist's own admiration for the artist has been up to now, and the greater the effort to fend off disappointment, the more vehemently the stronger the self-image of one's own self could be, if the self-image becomes more violent you admit who you worshiped.
It's not about forgiving or blurring individual mistakes or slip-ups - which of course can happen to artists - but about whether you're willing to cut those pages out of someone who's violent or victims of violence, to continue to pay homage to him in peace.
What is most unpleasant about it is not that there are people who still want to consume this art, but the mangy defiance with which they justify this need, this mixture of subservience (to the artist) and arrogance (to his critics) ,
As if there really were clean boundaries that could be drawn between people who create art, the conditions under which they do it, and the work they do. What kind of limits should that be, and who could pull them?
Would people who insist on a strict separation of work and artist hang a landscape painting of Hitler on the wall, if it were a really good picture? And if not: just out of fear of outlawing - or even out of an inner conviction that one's own aesthetic needs can not always be the only valid yardstick for valuing art?