There are artists you discover as an adult, when you already have enough awareness to know that liking someone’s work may eventually involve learning things about them you would rather not know. And then there are artists who arrived much earlier, before you were particularly interested in investigating anyone’s politics, before social media made everyone’s opinions immediately available, perhaps even before you had properly developed your own.
The art came first.
By the time everything else arrived, it had already attached itself to places, people, old bedrooms, commutes, friendships, heartbreaks, embarrassingly specific memories, and versions of yourself you can barely recognise anymore.
No artist should be absolved from whatever they say or do, but because somewhere along the way the work developed a second life inside mine. I can’t retroactively go back and tell a younger version of myself that she shouldn’t have loved something because of information she wouldn’t encounter until years later.
Unfortunately, time continues moving in one direction. Very inconvenient.
And knowing does change things.
I wrote last year that something definitely dies in that knowing. I still think that’s true, although now I wonder if dies was too clean a word for it. Maybe nothing dies. Maybe another layer simply gets added.
The song still sounds the same.
You don’t.
Because ‘support’ is also a strangely imprecise word.
Listening to an album you’ve owned for years. Streaming it. Buying another record. Buying merchandise. Going to a concert. Posting about the concert.
We often collapse all of those things into one question: Do you still support them?
I’m not sure they’re all the same thing.
Maybe what I’m actually negotiating isn’t whether I’m allowed to love the art anymore, but what I do with that love once it becomes complicated.
Consuming art critically is different from reflexively defending. Loving something while acknowledging its context is different from demanding that everyone else overlook that context because the work matters to you.
I think intention matters too, not because good intentions cancel out consequences, but because but because there is a difference between engaging with something consciously and just… not looking.
And maybe attention is where some of that intention actually shows up. Not as some transactional moral offset, but because awareness should ideally expand your cultural world rather than simply shrink it.
I certainly haven’t found one clean way to exist in the world, and I’m still learning how to navigate these contradictions myself.
P.S. Also reading Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Very on theme. Did not help make any of this less complicated, obviously.
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