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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Surely you have to draw a line somewhere, though?

Adolf Hitler was a painter and Kim Il-Jong directed movies. Neither of them was any good, but if they had been, would it really make sense to judge their art in isolation, without the slightest mention of the authors’ tyranny and mass murder?

Griffith made movies that he fully intended as Ku Klux Klan propaganda. That is not in doubt. At the same time these movies are also important technical achievements and milestones of cinema. It’s not “loathsome and cowardly” to point out his racist message.

A similar problem exists with Leni Riefenstahl, the photographer and director who exulted Hitler, as well as many 1960s European leftist directors who uncritically worshipped Mao. They all should be seen and criticized in context.

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Well, an obvious line is that the political views of political figures are more relevant than their hobbies.

The director in question was using his profession to peddle racist ideology. I don't think you're being consistent here.

As a joke I'll sometimes show images of Hitler's art to people. They're always received with high praise, and rarely is the praise retracted when they learn who the artist was. It's usually "oh that's funny, well he was pretty good. Wow. Didn't know that."

Yeah I think art and artist can be evaluated on separate criteria.

Nobody thinks Hitler’s art is museum-quality or art historically important in the same way that Griffith’s and Riefenstahl’s movies are.

And even if Hitler’s paintings really had been particularly good, I still don’t think museums in Germany and elsewhere would exhibit them. Enough people feel that would be highly disrespectful of the victims of the Holocaust (probably most museum curators would think that). You can of course believe this kind of red line shouldn’t exist in society, but it’s there.

My grandfather was a slave in Hitler's work camps. His parents and brothers perished in Hitler's death camps. And the story of his wife's family, my grandmother, would leave you shivering.

I would most certainly visit a museum exhibit of Hitler's paintings.

Your question was does it make sense to judge their art in isolation from the artist. I'm saying you can in fact do that and as an exercise in proving this fact I front load the art and follow with the artist and the net effect is positivity rather than hostility. But even if you were to present a monster's art in tandem with the fact that the artist was a monster I would go even further to bet that most people would judge the art on its own merits and find its origin trivial, even ironically humorous. I've known very few people who pearl clutch in life the way they do on the internet.

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