I’ve struggled with cancel culture. I have no problem with stopping consuming the art once artists run afoul, but it just sucks that so much of the art I enjoyed was made by questionable people. Maybe better said, people who have done highly questionable things, … sometimes on a regular basis. Crazy how something you consumed, that you’ve put so many other meanings to, something that’s brought you so much joy, can suddenly shift and make your college years soundtrack so empty.
Can you still love the art even if you loathe the artist? That’s a question I’ve asked many times, to myself and others. For me, once I know that an artist has done something despicable, consuming their art feels like I’m co-signing that behavior.
In sports, I can still watch a team, even when the star player did something terrible, within reason whatever that is for you, and not feel bad about it. So I wondered what makes art so different. With art, whether music, movies, or television, the performance, whether real or fictional, feels like it embodies a piece of the performer. I think that’s the thing that makes art so different from other mediums.
The idea that a performer gives a part of themselves is probably the reason I’ve had such a problem with AI-generated art (see, the title wasn’t clickbait). It took a while for me to be able to recognize why a song by an AI artist doesn’t have the same feel. When a singer sings a song, whether written by themselves or others, they draw on emotions they’ve faced throughout their lives. The good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. You can’t draw upon emotions that aren’t there, this is what makes art so human and why a single piece of art can have so many different meanings. Not only are the artists putting parts of themselves in their art, but the people consuming the art are as well. That’s why hearing what Amy Winehouse was going through when she made her album Back to Black made it so much more haunting of an album. It was a soundtrack for parts of my life, but she was telling her own true but tragic story.
Consuming art from imperfect artists reminds us all that we don’t have to be perfect to make something beautiful and that we can give our pain meaning, which doesn’t take it away, but can sometimes transform it into something you can share with others going through the same thing. It doesn’t fix it, but it can feel lighter knowing you’re not carrying that burden alone. That’s something AI art will never be able to do.