Love the Art, Hate the Artist?

It's a question that I see asked a lot these days. Can you love the art but hate the artist?

That's a question that's central to the essay On John Wayne, Cancel Culture, and the Art of Problematic Artists.

A man and his wife name their son John Wayne. At the baby shower the wife’s best friend pulls her aside: “Maybe it’s not my place to say it, but I just can’t believe you’d name your boy after a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe.” “Oh Deb,” the wife says, patting her friend on the shoulder, “you should know us better than that. We’d never name him after that John Wayne. We’re naming him after John Wayne Gacy.”

The joke, of course, is that Wayne is so out of favor in certain pockets of contemporary culture—particularly those vocal online—that a child-molesting, child-murdering clown could somehow be less problematic than the iconic Western actor.

In February of this year, an onslaught of twitter users declared Wayne “cancelled” when they discovered what many of us already knew: that the actor had a pretty extensive record of heinous views and shameful deeds. The tumult began with a tweet by a screenwriter named Matt Williams on the evening of February 17th: “Jesus fuck, John Wayne was a straight up piece of shit.” Williams accompanied those words with screenshots of Wayne’s infamous 1971 Playboy interview. The tweet went viral.

It's a long article that delves into both the history of John Wayne and the movies he became famous for and role of art and artists in our politically fractious times.