One things that’s been quietly haunting me more and more, is the internal reckoning I do between the art and the artist.
The reflex to look up whether some of the artists I follow, like, watch, or listen to have made problematic political statements—lately, especially in relation to something as urgent and painful as the genocide in Gaza.
Of course, it’s impossible to do a deep dive every single time. I still rely on quick scans and patchy context. Like all the other things we try to outrun, sometimes we just can’t escape it. We’re eventually brought back, made to face it all, to coexist with it.
Through all of this, I keep returning to when I became aware of these complexities: how that awareness shaped me, and what it continues to ask of me. Even with works I’ve cherished for years, I find myself revisiting them through this lens. Maybe that’s why it stings a little extra right now. I’m impatiently waiting for the eighth book in a series by a problematic arsehole. The excitement is still there, but it’s layered now.
It’s lonely sometimes. But it also feels necessary. We still enjoy the work, still feel the nostalgia, still underline the passages that move us. But something definitely dies in that knowing.
And maybe this, too, is part of the dignity of being a curator. We hold the tension. We map the work within its social currents. We listen not just to the artist’s craft, but to their conscience.
It’s fucked. But it binds.
