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Can evil make great art?
Is our appreciation of a work of art dependent on the morality of the artist?
Should we know the biography of an artist before we can fully assess the aesthetic validity of their work? Is one dependent on the validity of the other? It is no accident that the opening of this piece, including title and subtitle, have been posed as a series of consecutive questions. Normally the use of such rhetoric would assume that the answers would follow in the course of the discussion. Yet I will make no such claim here. The questions are open to a debate that has continued, and will continue to do so, for the foreseeable future. It is the questions that are important rather than any answer which will always remain relative or incomplete.
Imagine you have a piece of music that is very close to your heart. You play it often. It is a treasured piece that may also conjure up happy memories from the time you first heard it. Now imagine that after years of not knowing much about the musician or composer of the piece, you suddenly find out that this person was a paedophile who perhaps even committed the rape and murder of a small child? Not withstanding your previous innocent enjoyment of this person’s work, would your knowledge of his horrendous biography taint your enjoyment of the music. Could you even continue to listen to it anymore?
