In #MeToo age, can we love the art but deplore the artist?
Jeffrey McCune has never hesitated to speak out against what he calls the predatory energy and aggressive, toxic masculinity in R. Kelly’s music.
As an artist and social thinker, Dr. McCune has probed what he and others see as long-embedded patterns of patriarchy in American culture, “a culture that continues to produce moments of sickness and violence, which we see in R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey and so many others.”
But the moral reckonings of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have also posed vexing questions for him and a host of people around the country: How should we feel now about the art produced by these men, each considered masters, if not “geniuses,” of their crafts?
It’s a question, too, being asked within the halls of the high arts, as major painters and classical musicians accused of sexual harassment have also seen their contracts severed, their exhibitions cancelled, and their public reputations disgraced. Indeed, “Can I love the art but deplore the artist?” has become a moral question with both civic and deeply personal implications.
Especially for McCune, a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He came of age in Chicago deeply influenced by the music of R. Kelly, who attended the same high school he
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