The uneasy art of fallen stars

Michael Jackson’s relationship with culture is in the process of being recast. But can we continue to enjoy his work ?

Michael Jackson on stage at the height of his fame. Picture: AFP

In 1967, the French theorist Roland Barthes published a slender essay titled The Death of the Author that went on to attain intellectual authority well beyond its plausibility. Barthes’s core idea was that the “real person” who wrote the book, composed the song, painted the portrait or scored the symphony has no more bearing on its meaning or afterlife than, say, the weaver who makes a tapestry. The author is, for all intents and purposes, nothing more than a name on the title page: a bit of window dressing.

The public reaction to allegations of pedophilia levelled against Michael Jackson — detailed painstakingly and excruciatingly in HBO’s two-partdocumentary Leaving Neverland — suggests that Barthes’s breezy manifesto of ­authorial irrelevance was off target by some way.

The character of the artist matters acutely to people who consume art right across the spectrum of high to low, pop to posh. And this has never been truer than in our censorious age.

Jackson’s relationship with the culture is in the process of being recast and, ultimately, transformed. The damage has been done not by music critics but by the adult recollections of two of his child victims. Jackson’s vaporous, mellifluous voice, which had always seemed just a little quirky, now sounds decidedly creepy. Has there ever been a more apt name for an album than the singer’s incendiary Bad from 1987?

Early adopters of the outrage posture include local FM station Nova and three radio stations in Canada, The Netherlands and New Zealand, all of which have axed Jackson’s music in the wake of Leaving Neverland. A much-loved episode of The Simpsons featuring Jackson’s voice, titled Stark Raving Dad, has now been pulled from circulation on TV channels and streaming services.

Jackson has met his reputational nadir posthumously. But the fate of singer-songwriter R. Kelly, target of sexual misbehaviour allegations involving young women reaching back decades, is still in play. Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora pulled his music from curated playlists, ceasing, in effect, to promote it. Earlier this year the US network Lifetime began airing a six-part documentary focusing on his history of alleged sexual abuse, titled Surviving R. Kelly.

Kevin Spacey is living through the same kind of odium. The actor, on trial in a Massachusetts court for sexual assault against young men, has seen his House of Cards character Frank Underwood killed off by Netflix, which also binned his Gore Vidal biopic Gore.

This comes at a time when the heat generated by the #MeToo and Times Up movements has helped to revive sexual assault allegations against Woody Allen more than a quarter-century old.

Kevin Spacey leaves a court in Massachusetts in January. Picture: AP

The literary world is not immune from these convulsions. Last year the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz was accused of forcibly kissing a student, Zinzi Clemmons, who claimed the writer had long “made his behaviour the burden of women — particularly women of colour”.

More sensational still are allegations by writer Mary Karr of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of her former lover, David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in 2008. Karr tells how one night Foster Wallace, author of the cult doorstopper Infinite Jest — more than 1000 pages of wildly digressive hysterical realism — tried to push her from a moving car. On another occasion he hurled a coffee table at her.

Karr’s tale has prompted some university writing departments to consider banning his books, or relegating them to the optional list alongside minor writers.

The culture’s response to allegations of misbehaviour, sexual and otherwise, takes two contradictory forms: the first is outing; the second is disappearing.

In the case of Rolf Harris, who is serving a five-year jail sentence for indecent assault, the disappearance is quite literal. But the spectre of public oblivion also hangs over actor Geoffrey Rush, who stands accused of inappropriate behaviour with young female cast members. Rush has claimed that his currency as an artist had been damaged by the allegations, while his lawyer told the jury during his recent defamation trial that his client believed he might never work again. The verdict in that case is pending.

Many reject the case for man-made climate change but few would deny the existence of a broad change in the climate of opinion regarding sexual crimes and misdemeanours. The British producer-director of Leaving Neverland, Dan Reed, concedes that his documentary might not have played to such a receptive audience in an era before the resistance movement rose to prominence. “#MeToo started up while we were in production and I think it has influenced people to take a moment and listen to — and be more likely to believe — a person about a story of sexual abuse.”

Bad behaviour was once an aid to artistic fame rather than a hindrance to it. The clubfooted Lord Byron, famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, was the most feted of the romantic poets, the toast of giddy Regency-era high society. His reputation certainly didn’t stop Lamb from falling into his “dangerous” arms after stroking his artistic ego with fan mail. Nor did the infamy of convicted murderer and poet Richard Savage, whose own mother claimed he tried to kill her after breaking into her home, curb Samuel Johnson, the very model of the acerbic English Tory, from writing a sympathetic Life of Savage,first published in 1744. Where people today are inclined to rush to moral judgment, Johnson was all too happy to suspend it.

Artists and their art often benefit from an air of mystery. The pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s four-volume Neapolitan series has shot to international bestseller status through a combination of compelling narrative art and strict authorial anony­mity, while its mysterious author has vaulted at one bound into the ranks of the mega-rich. The two most enduring authors in Western literature, the twin pillars of the so-called canon, are a supposedly blind bard named Homer about whom nothing at all is known — there may never have actually been a Homer — and a canny Stratfordian whose biography is a mere sketch given shape and volume by conjecture. There is even a theory — given scant credence these days but solid enough for a 65-footnote Wiki entry — that Shakespeare’s works were quilled by his rival Christopher Marlowe.

But these are exceptions to the general rule that the artist is a figure of palpable reality through whom we interpret art, and if the character of the artist is repugnant in any way, the art is likely to suffer. High art, since the time of Homer, has been regarded in one sense as a teaching — a form of moral nourishment — and since the romantic era in particular it has been viewed as the precious effusion of the artist’s “true self”.

One reason the author steadfastly refuses to die, despite Barthes’s premature obituary, is that he is joined to his audience in a collusive pact. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first to give this ephemeral bond some semblance of psychological precision when he coined the term “willing suspension of disbelief”. This state of temporary credulity, Coleridge went on to explain, induces a state of “poetic faith”. But the white magic of poetic faith is a delicate, evanescent thing. For it to work its magic the audience needs to trust the performer. The spell is easily broken by a bad performance or a bad, ethically speaking, performer.

The case of Richard Wagner, whose myth-saturated music was much beloved by Hitler and the Reich, is a complicated one. Wagner’s fascist stain has greatly diminished in the past half century, and much lip curling among opera­goers has ceased through sheer moral exhaustion. Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim has even, though not without controversy, played a Wagner encore from Tristan und Isolde in Jerusalem.

Outside of Israel, Wagner today is loved as much as he is loathed. But the reputation of Austrian composer Anton Bruckner, who was also adored by the Nazis, nicely illustrates the manner in which aesthetic appreciation of music is coloured, or discoloured, by moral context.

A sensitive listener of the adagio, or slow movement, in Bruckner’s Symphony No 7 will likely be transported by its solemn and elegiac majesty, but listen again, armed with the knowledge that this movement accompanied the news broadcast on German radio of Hitler’s death, and it takes on darker tones that are not so much sonically as ethically discordant.

Michael Jackson’s songs seem destined for a similar fate. Even if they’re not pulled from playlists worldwide, they will never again be heard naively, without the ­competing soundtrack of Leaving Neverland.

The Greeks of the classical era probed the complex relationship between art and ethics some 24 centuries ago, and their insights are still relevant. The standard view of 4th century BC philosopher Plato is that he was a killjoy for banishing artists from his ideal society. But Plato is more complicated than that.

He speaks through his mouthpiece and chief interlocutor, Socrates, who takes up different positions at different times. Plato, through Socrates, is critical of poets because they fail to “educate men and make them better”. Legitimate art, in the Platonic ideal, is truthful and righteous and its purpose is to challenge prevailing views. Contemporary culture seems to have taken up something like this position. Most of this year’s seven Oscar nominees for best picture, including the winner Green Book, were political, moral or advocacy narratives.

Plato, however, is nothing if not paradoxical and elsewhere his Socrates seems to say that artists can’t really be artists if they aren’t, at the same time, nutjobs. Socrates talks of a “kind of possession and madness” that comes from the muses and “anyone who approaches the doors of poetic composition without the muses’ madness, in the conviction that skill alone will make him a competent poet, is cheated of this goal. In his sanity both he and his poetry are eclipsed by poetry composed by men who are mad …”

It may be that, many centuries after Plato set out his paradox about the problem of ethics and art, we are still positioned uncomfortably on its horns. Artists are often tilted at a strange angle to the world, and the more famous the artist, it seems, the more pronounced the tilt.

American critic Edmund Wilson explored this point in his classic work of literary criticism, The Wound and the Bow, which springboards from the Greek myth of Philoctetes, whose divine gift as an archer is teamed with the curse of a suppurating snakebite. Wilson’s extended essay on Charles Dickens, which teases out the author’s “hardness and cruelty” as well as his brilliance and bonhomie, is a skilful study of the illness, or wound, from which great art often springs; and a reminder that the artist with all his quirks, his foibles, and his demons, is very much alive.