“Can We Separate the Art from the Artist? Moral Character, Artistic Creation, and Ethical Criticism”
27Nov
Speaker
Dr. Ted Nannicelli
Lecturer
School of Communication and Arts
The University of Queensland
Time
1130-1240, 27 Nov 2018
Venue
AST916, Sing Tao Building, Ho Sin Hang Campus, HKBU
Speaker bio:
Ted Nannicelli teaches in the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland. Before arriving at UQ, he received a M.F.A. in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and a P.h.D. in Film Studies from the University of Kent, and he taught at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He is editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, co-editor of Cognitive Media Theory (2014), and author of A Philosophy of the Screenplay (2013) and Appreciating the Art of Television (2017). His current book project, Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Abstracts:
In this talk, I address a hot-button issue in cultural criticism that raises a number of interesting questions about the artistic and ethical evaluation of art. The controversy is about the appropriate response to the artworks created by morally reprehensible artists such as Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby. Can we separate the art from the artist? I consider this question in the context of my current research project, Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism, which develops a production-oriented approach to the ethical evaluation of art in terms of how it is created. My approach is based on the idea that the provenance and production history are relevant to artistic and ethical evaluation because they are partly constitutive of the identity of a work. However, this sort of anti-empiricist argument seems to open to the door to the possibility that, in fact, there is an even wider array of contextual contributory factors in our valuing of art than might be supposed or desired -- one of which is the artist’s moral character. I argue this is a consequence that we can happily accept, so long as we acknowledge we will need to proceed on a case-by-case basis to determine when an artist’s morally reproachable character traits are only circumstantially related to the artwork and when they actually artistically relevant.
