The artist and the “art”

The Hollywood Reporter profiled Babi Christina Engelhardt who, more than 40 years ago, had an affair with Woody Allen when she was 16 and he was 41. That means Allen’s 1979 movie Manhattan was a depiction of that relationship.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville says it is time to stop insisting that we “separate the art from the artist.”

Allen is an artist who does not want to be separated from his art. To the absolute contrary, his art is *about his life*. Even more specifically, his art is about normalizing the abuse he perpetrates in his life, laundering his predation into romance. And he doesn't even do it by concealing or softening the abuse, but simply by telling the story with witty banter that makes it palatable to audiences who are themselves primed by the rape culture to tolerate abuse of women and girls, given the slightest opportunity to view it as something else.
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But this is the truth about abusive men who make art about their abuse: They don't want to be separated from their art.

They want their art to serve as confession, and they want acclaim to serve as absolution.

We’re too willing to see all this as art so we can deny it is confession.



In a separate post on Shakesville Fannie Wolf looks at a sexual harassment incident between Yael Stone and Geoffrey Rush. She went on to write:

Rape culture exists, in part, to grant ugly, powerful old dudes sexual access to young attractive people under the lie that such men are hot, sexually-desirable studs, rather than just possessive of some financial, physical, emotional, professional, and/or cultural power over their targets.
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As women bare detail after detail of their traumas, the backlash crowd starts first from the assumption that cushy jobs are certain men's birthright and second from the assumption that even if women might have "experienced distress," the men's pain is simply the more compelling pain for us to concern ourselves with.
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Consider, that many of the high-profile #MeToo cases involve attractive, thin cishet white women is a reflection of the complicated reality that the pain of attractive, thin cishet white women matters more in the court of public opinion than other women's pain, that no woman is safe, and that a lot of misogynistic sadists exist in the US who love nothing more than reading about "hot" powerful, uppity women being humiliated.

So tell me, how, exactly, is art separate from the human beings who both create it and live, love, breathe, eat, sleep, laugh, fuck, rape, and terrorize within rape culture?