ESSAY: Music By Maniacs: Navigating the Tricky Ethics of Enjoying Art Made By Bad People

A link to an article of mine published in the online journal 'Heathen Harvest'.  The article is all about analysing the tension between the "goodness" of a piece of art and the "badness" of the art's creator, through the lenses of music and murder and mallets and multi-faceted beinghood.  It was published on the 30th of May, 2014, and edited not too harshly by the very patient Sage Weatherford.  It's pretty good, I think, even though it doesn't seem to reach any viscerally-satisfactory conclusions.

"Is appreciating someone’s art actually an act of supporting their lifestyle? Is the feeling I feel when I listen to “Dissected Pugacheva” one of pure aesthetic enjoyment, or is it now tainted by guilt – or is it actually heightened by knowing the hands that played those guitar strings also fatally propelled a wooden hammer into the face of a 12-year-old boy?"

Music By Maniacs: Navigating the Tricky Ethics of Enjoying Art Made By Bad People