Philosophers throughout the years have struggled with the notion of separating an artist from his art when that artist is discovered to have morally transgressed.
Erich Hatala Matthes has argued that continuing to champion art by corrupt figures can constitute a form of moral failure if it contributes to ongoing harm – such as validating their abuse, silencing victims or perpetuating cultural power structures.
AW Eaton has written that we do not necessarily have to destroy or censor the work of terrible people, but we have a moral obligation to change how we exhibit and discuss it. Enjoying the work uncritically becomes ethically untenable once systemic harm is revealed.
And now, in the light of the sentencing of Russell Brand and the reveal that David Walliamson has been accused of abusing his celebrity to groom teenage girls for sex, one of the foremost thinkers of our age has been pontificating on how we should reevaluate their output: GB News’s US political editor Tom Harwood.
Writing on X, the noted intellectual wrote: “You can still enjoy Michael Jackson’s music and you can still watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Come Fly With Me too.”
In the unlikely event that you’re not aware of these two totemic pieces of early 21st-century culture, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a 2008 romcom about a music composer who goes on holiday to Hawaii to move on from a painful breakup. Brand plays his ex’s new boyfriend in a performance cruelly ignored by that year’s Academy Award judges.
Come Fly With Me, meanwhile, is a 2010 BBC mockumentary about budget airlines starring Walliamson and Matt Lucas, in which the pair blacked up to play an Arab aviation tycoon named Omar Baba and a 50-something Jamaican woman called Precious Little (catchphrase: “Praise the Lord!”) respectively. It was cancelled after one series and has since been removed from Netflix. Presumably Harwood has the DVD box set.
Still, his cultural recommendations weren’t even the worst part of his post. After one follower responded “Elvis”, Harwood responded: “I wonder what the precise moment was when it stopped being okay for adult rock stars to date 14 year old girls.”
And when another wrote: “What about the art of Adolf Hitler?”, Harwood mused: “it just wasn’t very good was it. better comparator [sic] is Wagner” (a comparator is a scientific device or circuit that measures one value against a standard or another value to show which is larger).
He’s right, though: the first thing people note about Hitler was his substandard doodlings. All hail GB News’s new philosopher king!
Most popular
The reckoning I thought Russell Brand would never face
Slavoj Žižek: Beating Trump isn’t the wild triumph you all seem to think
What the hell happened to Allison Pearson?
How the US pollsters got the midterms so wrong
