1. So I have a few thoughts about Jules Verne, Les Frères Kip, the Dreyfus case, D.H. Lawrence and Kanye West. (Jack Kirby may or may not show up as well).
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9. I would not make any great claims for Verne nor for The Kip Brothers (a simple adventure story, a minor work of a minor author). But even Verne shows how complicated the relationship between explicit ideology & art is.
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10. D.H. Lawrence: "Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it." Good advice since Lawrence himself was a proto-fascist dingbat.
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11. Artists, like almost everyone else, have political views but to the extent their art is complex those views don't map perfectly with the ideology. Often enough, as with Verne, art is a way of exploring possibilities & problems the ideology doesn't allow for.
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12. It's perfectly natural to be interested in an artist's life & explicit views, but that's never quite the same as encountering the art, which has a meaning that includes conscious intent but also goes beyond conscious intent.
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13. All of which is to say that if Kanye's music is meaningful to you, then you should continue to find meaning in it, whether he's dumping on George W. Bush or (ugh) praising Trump. Because the tale & the teller are separate.
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14. The interesting flip side of this is that you can't value an artist just for having your politics. I mean Jack Kirby, from my point of view, had great politics: social democrat, anti-fascist, anti-racist. But those views aren't the sum of his art either.
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