What Happens to the Art When the Artist is a Bag of Shits?
Bill Cosby did a great disservice to the world the first time, and subsequent times, that he assaulted a woman; not only did he destroy people’s lives, but he also negated his important impact on the world. I know in any discussion of Bill Cosby emotional baggage comes with the territory. Many articles have written about his abominations with that baggage in place, but I write this post today to mourn the loss of the works of a once thought great artist.
When examining the work of an artist, we often do it through autobiographical means; but this perspective tends to fail when the artist proves to be a shit bag like Bill Cosby. It cannot be denied that Bill Cosby’s impact on, not just the world of comedy but, the display of people of colour is monumental. He presented the first three dimensional African American characters to the white centric world of American entertainment; not only in his ground-breaking headlining of I Spy, but in his appearances on celebrity roasts, variety hours, late night shows. He showed Americans in the entertainment world that a black man could do much more than tap dance. His later contribution, the wholesome Cosby Show, broke with the mould of the Jeffersons and presented black people as professionals, lawyers, an OBGYN (a troubling position now we know Cosby’s criminal actions), professors, and poets. The Cosby Show also revelled in the contributions of other African Americans; the show had episodes about Jazz being the first American artform, the poetry of Langston Hughes was read alongside Emerson, and even an episode dedicated to African American Shakespearian performance. Cosby was a champion of humanism; or so we thought.
Now, this great legacy is tarnished; destroyed; cannot be talked about without holding back a large clump of vomit in the throat. For we now know the truth. Bill Cosby is a rapist.
What do we do in this situation? Is it possible to look at the art without the artist?
I’ve been reading biographies of artists of recent. One bio I slogged through is William Beckett’s nauseating summation of the life of Franz Liszt’, Franz Liszt; the Missed Genius (1956). Beckett claims that Liszt’s ‘true genius’ was stymied by the control of women; because Liszt was something of a Casanova, he was unable to separate his work from virtuosity and transcend into the realm of genius. This claim is spurious and two dimensional to say the least; ‘male chauvinist’ if I were to go further. Liszt at the age of 23, when he likely composed the Totentanz (a marvelous mini piano concerto), was already pioneering the limits of the piano; he discovered that a piano is percussive. This discovery anticipates the work of Stravinsky by eighty years at least. Totentanz is enough to make him a genius in any book, but Beckett disregards it, not giving that creative process more than a glancing sentence. He’d rather fill his book with tales of wicked women distracting Liszt from his destiny; a life summed up in scandal. Beckett’s chauvinistic summation of the influence of Liszt is based on the artist’s personal life, his art matters little in the bio; according to Beckett ‘scandal’ is why we are now interested in Liszt.
Scandal leads me to Liszt’s best friend; a character that rivals Bill Cosby in shitbaggery: Richard Wagner. Wagner is one of the most influential artists of the last three hundred years. By all accounts (even Franz Liszt’s) Richard was a true shitbag. He committed a few forms of fraud, hit up everyone in his social circle for loans he had no intention of repaying, was cruel to women and men alike, and on top of it all, was a rabid anti-Semite. Wagner’s anti-Semitism went to absurd levels, for example, he was noted for wearing gloves when he conducted the work of Mendelssohn to not touch the Jewishness of the music.
There is nothing absurd about Wagner’s artistic influence. He perfected the leitmotif, a major component of his total work of art ‘Gesamkunstkwerk.’ Without leitmotif we would not have film music, musical theatre would not exist, rock music either; even Jazz owes some debt to the shit-bag Wagner. Wagner, along with Zola, was one of the first stage magicians that asked his performers to embrace psychology; an idea that became naturalism and would be cited by Ibsen, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Shaw, the list goes on.
Wagner, like many of the Romantics, was obsessed with the work of Shakespeare. He, of course, placed all his biases and shitbagerry on that figure. It’s easy to impose whatever you like on Shakespeare because as anyone who has studied the figure knows, we know next to nothing about who Shakespeare was as a person. We don’t even really know how to spell his name, for he himself never spelt it the same way; but because we know so little about him everyone is welcome to place whatever opinion they wish on him. Shakespeare can be a progressive, a womanizer, a homosexual, a bisexual, a Catholic, a Protestant, a secret Jew, a patsy, a fake, what have you; all these labels, and many others, have been applied to Shakespeare. Furthermore, they all stand because so little primary biographical material exists.
A discussion of Shakespeare brings me back to the question that I began this essay with: how much does the artist matter to their work?
I, as you can guess, would argue little. As proven by Shakespeare the work survives the memory of the artist.
(As a sidebar, I believe the reason the work of Ben Jonson is less adored, even though I find his work funnier than anything Shakespeare wrote, is because Ben Jonson, in publishing his own work and biography, made it possible for later generations to get to know him. Later audiences are unable to put their own avatar over his identity therefore he’s of less commercial interest.)
What do we do with Bill Cosby, whose identity is now clear? Do we negate all his work? Does that negate the work that descends after him as well?
I don’t have an answer. Bill Cosby will not be the first artist to be lost because the flesh is found wanting. We will be unable to wash the man from history because unlike Shakespeare the internet has preserved it. He cannot be willfully ignored like the modern Opera companies do with Wagner because there are actual victims of his violence – Wagner’s victims are long lost or tangential (i.e. Hitler’s obsession with Wagnerian philosophy). I’m sure future William Becketts out there will pick and choose what they talk about when they write the biographies of Cosby, but then again, the public record will poke holes in that as well..
The art of Cosby is now lost. The baggage is too much. The artist is a shitbag.
No wonder cynicism is so rampant today.