this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
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Something something separate art from the artist something something
Impossible to do in its entirety, the self is always wrapped up in the art it produces to some degree.
The meaning of art is up to the audience, not the creator.
Reading Mein Kampf now, but I've decided it's a romance novel.
(/s, obviously)
One of the most wonderful things about artwork is that it provides anyone experiencing it a direct connection to the artist. Sure artists can filter but they still put some of their real selves into the artwork no matter how hard they try not to.
The other side of that coin is great artwork affects the one experiencing it. Think about how much your own life you experience and filter through the lenses of the books, movies, music and artwork that you've experienced up to that point. If you ever draw connections between real life and artwork, that's one of the ways that art changes you, and that's part of why avoiding artwork written by hateful people is worth the effort.
Of course there's also interest in experiencing artwork that you know was made by a hateful individual. Take Falling in Reverse for example. Ronnie Radcliffe, their lead is generally a pretty shitty human, and knowing that you can notice how the music he writes and performs tends to mostly be very surface level "I'm a broken person" and "everyone hates me" with a bit of "everyone who hates me is a loser!" thrown in for good measure. This is his true self showing through the work. Or if we look at H.P. Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu, you'll notice Lovecraft seems to be far more terrified by the non-white Cthulhu worshippers in his works than by Cthulhu himself, with far more visceral and descriptive writing relating to the horrors given to the worshippers. Again this is the true self showing through as Lovecraft was incredibly racist even for the time