Abstract
Political beings as we are, our work often becomes a looking glass through which the world sees. Try as liberal theory might to separate the public from the private, they exist only as oppositional forces and thus necessarily influence and shape each other. Thus, a person’s politics influences the art he creates. And yet, with the audience, the art begets a life of its own, changing and growing with the audience’s politics. The problem arises when the audience accepts the art but rejects the person – the separation of the artist from his art is a question that has important ramifications across disciplines; be it the bifurcation of judges’ private lives and their actions in Court or the allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of an otherwise prominent and efficient bureaucrat. This paper shall deal with the question of misdemeanours on the part of artists – filmmakers, musicians, authors because of the magnanimous influence they have in shaping the sociopolitical attitude of the people. The question of the separation will always remain important but its relevance in evaluating the art independently become less important as space is permitted for opposing narratives from the marketplace of ideas as facilitated by social media today.
Custom Citation
Manasi Gandhi, 'Blurred Lines - Between the Artist and his Art' (2015) 11(2) Socio Legal Review 67.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.55496/RPDH8100
