Let Us Not Scapegoat the Goats
I wrote a bit of brainpuke about John Darnielle and the notion of his having a “fall from grace” for disclosing his long-time association with Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of Hamilton. Disenchanted critics claim that his association with this artist is the association with a man who glorifies slave-owning in his art, and presumably that Miranda’s glorification of slave-owning reflects an endorsement of slave-owning on the part of Darnielle. Because I have a long-standing love of his musical corpus and many affective attachments cathected to it, I had to center those passions before I could step back from them and think more critically about the opinions I truly wanted to form about the topic of John Darnielle’s seemingly meteoric ascent to fame and its general relationship to not only my aesthetic enjoyment of his artworks but how I think about the moral status of his art.
This panel discussion on The Relationship of Art to Artist featuring my friend Dr. Eric Winsberg and several other scholars, hosted by the Dali Museum, was very helpful in thinking through the issues apart from my affective investment in Darnielle’s art. Both pieces of writing I’ve written on this subject as it pertains to Darnielle’s friendship with Lin-Manuel Miranda ought to be read together.
In the Dalí panel discussion, Dr. Eric Winsberg suggests that the primary time we risk problems arising from cancel culture is when there is a sort of over-saturation of meaning which develops in a reference to an artwork or artist, imputing a greater level of endorsement to the artist’s misdeeds than is necessarily implied by simply making a statement about some level of appreciation for a specific work by that artist or an artist generally. He points out that art was, for example during the Roman Empire, often created in horrific conditions of slavery and violence. Often the thematic content which is thought to make an artwork appealing is also glorifying violence or other content we want to reject. Dr. Jamie Goldenberg argues that the same impulses which give rise to the creation of art may even be the same which tend towards the arising of misbehavior. She argues that this is the case because art has an existential connection to our confrontation with our own mortality, which creates a sort of intrinsically volatile or unstable affective environment. There is an implication that therefore we may sort of have to let, or at least expect artists to misbehave ethically in some ways if they are to create art. Of course, this does not absolve the artist from culpability if they engage in ethical or moral transgressions. If the same forces generating aesthetic enjoyment of an artwork also are rooted in what makes that work immoral, then one has to be able to be at a critical distance from the work in order to be able to consider it from the sphere of ethics. An artist can do this themselves as a spectator of their own work in addition to acting as the creator, although the role of the spectator remains absolutely critical.
I think at first glance that the notion of over-saturation—as Dr. Winsberg puts it, assigning too high of a “signaling value” to commentary about the work of an artist—accurately describes the animating hostility John Darnielle faces for disclosing that he has a fruitful reciprocal creative dialogue pertaining to art. We are, as Dr. Hank Hine points out in the Dalí panel, often familiar with the experience of disappointment in figures we would like to revere. This is actually true in all spheres of life, and we shouldn’t single out artists—but just as much does it too apply in art. While as Dr. Kimberley Macuare argues, an artwork can “come to life” in a manner which means its aesthetic virtues function independently of the intentionality of the artist, it is hard to imagine that Miranda’s centering the Founding Fathers in a musical doesn’t require some level of endorsement of the slavery which activated the machinery of their power even if the characters are portrayed as complex figures with distinct and nuanced ethical status (as all human beings are). The disagreement I have isn’t in the claim that a musical like Hamilton would to some degree require an affirmation of the realities upon which the United States was founded and the realities under which it functions today; rather, my disagreement is in the question of whether it is singularly up to John Darnielle himself as a musician to renounce all associations with anyone in his industry who could be said to portray the realities of chattel slavery in a sort of dreamily utopian or unduly favorable light.
There is an immense aesthetic value and rich power in the corpus of John Darnielle’s works which are incredibly dynamic and stirring taken individually and even more so when his progression as a musician is examined as a whole. My initial impulse when I saw folks attacking Darnielle’s ethical character was thus to provide a sort of curriculum vitae of my status as an admirer of Darnielle’s works before launching into a defense of him as a man. “In Defense of John Darnielle” is rife with rhetorical flourish channeling some of the tone and thematic content of Darnielle’s lyrics. I find that in order to enter into such a headspace I have to abdicate with the even-tempered mindset, which is required for disinterested contemplation, just as method actors do, and imagine myself to embody a certain type of character.
Going back to a time pre-dating Darnielle’s friendship with Miranda, the characters who inhabit and animate his lyrical universes have always been deeply morally ambiguous and In conflict with themselves in matters of good and evil, and right and wrong. A great value in his song lyrics lies precisely in the fact that the characters (who are not to be conflated with Darnielle himself as a person!) openly struggle with difficult and disturbing aspects of human existence. He has expressed very overtly a desire to de-emphasize the thematic content centering a certain type of “intensity” emanating from angry men which perhaps celebritizes radicalization and extremist violence.
How helpful is it to focus questions about moral culpability and agency solely on the hypothetical virtues or misdeeds of artists themselves? How much less helpful is it to do so solely on the basis of a photograph with an artist of a different political stripe than oneself?
Rather, is there not the entire constellation of the market influence of the audience itself, of sources of patronage—a constellation determining which factors can make the artist’s creation possible, and thereby also limiting what that art can be. These limiting factors are always a condition of the positive existence of the artwork and often are very deeply negative, just as the founding of a nation involves violence which is very negative. But an artist is playing a role on a stage and is not thereby themselves literally acting with violence. It doesn’t make sense to assign culpability solely to artists as creators—even if they are elite figures who perhaps do have a uniquely high level of responsibility to exhibit ethical behavior— at a standard to which the rest of the community is not held. Not without information regarding the actual conditions of life under which not merely the artworks but the artist themselves and their loved ones can exist.
The Icelandic musician Björk said that when you create a song you have a “child” and you have to make certain that it lives to be at least fifteen years old. This is a fruitful way to conceive of the responsibilities of the artist to the artwork which probably are more likely to avoid the types of ethical dilemmas we are concerned with here. But the reality is also that the Founding Fathers’ legacy in founding the United States of America is not going anywhere; that reality continues to impact the present day and we live our lives day in and day out under conditions such as what can be called a basic state of “national security” due to the state apparatus which was established both through the labor of marginalized people during the time period of the U.S.’ founding and also through the crafting of mythological-historical narratives about the personages of the Founding Fathers themselves. People need to step back from the pyrotechnics and engage in a reality-check. John Darnielle is not a deity, as much as he evokes the supernatural with masterful skill in his lyrics. He is not identical to the voices of his characters, a distinction between author and narrator which is important to creative freedom in art. He cannot change the course of history singlehandedly and most especially cannot rewrite the past.
We can perhaps question the tendency to evoke and emphasize Medieval time periods in his work, which we increasingly see in his more recent discography. Yet as Dr. Winsberg stated, there were plenty of people in the past who even then objected to views we consider to be racist and misogynist, et cetera, just as much as there are such people today. The mere fact of evoking medieval imagery does nothing to demonstrate malicious intent in Darnielle’s work, any more than we can conclude from the sheer information that he has had artistic correspondence with Miranda that Darnielle endorses everything in Miranda’s art. This is assuming (which, as I haven’t seen Hamilton, I can’t say I do) that Miranda’s work glorifies slavery. In fact, as an artist myself, I think it is overwhelmingly more likely that some or even most of the value of Darnielle’s friendship with Miranda arises from their probably often disagreeing about things. Perhaps disagreement is more productive for artists because art has some special tendency to involve definition of oneself existentially as a unique individual. Perhaps disagreement, too, is more productive for civil democracy.
Caravaggio was violent; I have not seen any evidence that Darnielle is. The Founding Fathers engaged in violence; having a conversation with a man who wrote a musical depicting them in a positive light, even a long conversation which impacts one’s own trajectory as an artist, is on its own not remotely near sufficient basis to conclude that Darnielle engages in violence or endorses it. We don’t have to let people be poorly behaved simply because they are artists; nor do I want to let spectators be poorly behaved simply because they are not. John Darnielle’s works must be understood as they really are, and not through an impulsive and knee-jerk pattern of guilt by association which is, if one is realistically confronting the conditions under which every citizen in the United States can exist peaceably and survive today, functionally unavoidable. This difficult and irresolvable ethical dilemma is something which pertains to every single person exercising any rights of citizenship on United States soil; pursuing an overinvestment and saturation of meaning imputed onto certain individuals who are subject to public scrutiny is a distasteful reality which famous artists must face, but the ambition and scope of Darnielle’s lyrical writing is real and has its own life, as it has for decades. It is not the artist in this case upon whom this oversaturation of moral responsibility in the actions of the artist reflects most poorly.
We all contain a potential to cultivate or not cultivate radically evil impulses in ourselves; for an artist to be able to portray and simulate such aspects of human existence for the purpose of establishing a moral code or ethical philosophy of life without truly embodying the evil depicted is a sign of virtue in the artist, rather than vice. I see completely insufficient basis to conclude that John Darnielle has “become a monster in the process of fighting monsters,” to quote the most mundane of Nietzsche’s phrases as this controversy aims at the most ignoble possible interpretation of Darnielle’s works.
If you can get on board with the ideas I’ve expressed in the preceding argument, I think that there is some value to your reading the stylistically wilder piece of writing I created on this subject When My Name Was Everywhere: In Defense of John Darnielle.