In a media culture ruled by tabloids and paparazzi, no stone is left unturned in a celebrity’s private life. This often makes it difficult to separate the personal from the professional, the life from the life’s work.
A few months ago, Filipinos saw actress Nora Aunor at the heart of exactly this kind of debate. The controversy began when President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III removed her from a list of National Artist contenders. Her near-unshakeable status as an icon—established ever since journalist Nick Joaquin, a National Artist himself, called her the golden girl of local cinema in 1970—did not deter Aquino from passing her over in light of nine-year-old allegations of drug possession.
Similar scandals have often haunted the reputation of celebrities who are otherwise considered “good” artists. International headlines have grappled with the likes of directors Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and fashion photographer Terry Richardson, who have all been entangled in scandals involving sexual assault. While these men make Aunor’s crime almost petty, they too have prompted people to ask: Can “bad” people make “good” art?
Defending Nora
The answer seems clear enough: Bad people make unquestionably good art all the time, according to a 2012 piece in the New York Times by Charles McGrath. The question is only misleading because “badness and goodness in this formulation don’t refer to the same thing.” In the case of the person, these refer to moral judgment, while in the case of art, these serve as signs “of aesthetic merit, to which morality does not apply.”
Poet and critic Louie Sanchez, an instructor from the English Department, agrees with this sentiment. “I’d say that the artists’ deviance should be assessed according to approved social norms—even political or criminal justice systems,” he explains. “Deviance—or criminal acts for that matter—should be assessed in another space of interrogation. Art has its own concerns.”
To someone too young to have been around for Nora Aunor’s prime, Alfred Marasigan, a painter and a lecturer at the Fine Arts Department, the situation can seem trivial. “I feel a bit left out of the loop,” he admits, “because I myself didn’t witness the glory days of Nora Aunor, but I think the function of the award is to facilitate education—to let the Filipino people understand the artist’s significance in her field.”
Sanchez supposes that the National Commission for Culture and the Arts’ (NCCA) decision to support Aquino in this matter was made to stay in line with the so-called daang matuwid. Like many of those who disagreed with Aquino’s decision, he believes that since Aunor passed the screenings, she should have been given the award anyway. “I find the drug issue peripheral; it has nothing to do with her art,” he declares.
He offers up a reference to the French philosopher Roland Barthes, saying that, since the work and the artist are subject to differing standards, art must be assessed on its own. “In literature, there is the notion of the author’s death, where the author subsumes his personality to that of the work in the moment of creation, and he vanishes altogether in that assigned moment.”
Artist versus predator
Perhaps the question isn’t whether bad people can make good art, but whether good art can justify the actions of bad people. It’s a question of whether Richardson, who is well known for sexualizing his subjects, should still be shooting campaigns and covers despite several models alleging that he coerced them into performing sexual favors. It is also a question of whether Polanski deserves his numerous accolades even after pleading guilty to the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl named Samantha Geimer in 1977; in 2013, she came out with The Girl, a tell-all book describing how Polanski lured her into the home of actor Jack Nicholson under the pretense of a French Vogue shoot.
From Laurel Fantauzzo, an essayist as well as a lecturer at the Fine Arts Program, comes a firm no. In fact, she becomes visibly frustrated when asked about Polanski’s lauded return to filmmaking. In her opinion, the delineation between bad people and good art is so blurred that it doesn’t make sense to make distinctions. “In lauding him, your consciousness is required to shrug at his choices. It makes me wonder: How many violent abusers, in everyday life, do we enable with our resigned shrugs?”
In 1993, the personal life Woody Allen had built with his then-partner Mia Farrow was set on fire by allegations that the former had abused their daughter Dylan. Earlier this year, the younger Farrow wrote an open letter in the New York Timeswith her take on the issue. In it, she addressed those who had shrugged at her father’s choices by giving him the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement and nominating his film Blue Jasmine (2013) for Best Original Screenplay at the 2014 Golden Globe Awards.
Her recounting of her abuse was framed by the question, “What’s your favorite Woody Allen movie?” Her point was well-made: Publicly praising her abuser as an artist was akin to being complicit to both her abuse and that of other children. There were readers who dismissed Farrow’s effort to bridge morality and aesthetic judgment, saying that it was possible to see sexual assault as a heinous crime and Blue Jasmine as a work of art.
Fantauzzo attributes these dismissals to our failure to give sexual assault the level of attention it deserves. “The average viewer of a film or buyer of a shirt will usually hear that the maker of the film, shirt or art was creepy, a convicted rapist, or otherwise unapologetic about his own decision to sexually assault another person,” she says. “The viewer or consumer will shrug and say, ‘Well, the film is a masterpiece and the shirt looks good on me,’ and decide that, while the assault was terrible, the products are simply separate from the artist’s sins.”
She would most likely disagree with any attempts to find a middle ground, which is what the Tumblr blog Your Fave Is Problematic tries to do. Its moderators call themselves “record-keepers” of every “problematic” thing a celebrity has ever said. They propose that perhaps the most comfortable way of dealing with this debate is simply acknowledging that people, however publicly they live their lives, are more complex than they appear.
Conflict and consensus
The Aunor controversy is not an isolated case. In 2009, former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was criticized for naming Philippine Educational Theater Association founder Cecile Guidote-Alvarez, comic strip creator Carlo Caparas, architect Francisco Mañosa and fashion designer Pitoy Moreno to the Order of National Artists.
Bienvenido Lumbera, a National Artist and a member of the NCCA’s final selection committee, argued that Guidote-Alvarez should have had the delicadeza to refuse, as she was the executive director of the NCCA at the time. He also objected to Caparas’ inclusion since his nomination had already been rejected twice in the past.
When it comes to the title of National Artist, it appears politics truly is inescapable. Former President Ferdinand Marcos established it as a presidential award in 1973, giving the president the prerogative to nominate or reject even without an explanation. Aesthetic merit, it seems, cannot stand on its own. “Any artistic recognition is comprised of political, logistic, financial and personal judgments on talent and reputation,” muses Marasigan.
This doesn’t necessarily have to be a cause for despair, however. What Marasigan finds most interesting is that, with or without the award, Aunor’s artistic immortality is entirely up to the people. “If this issue prompts people to know more about her, her contributions to Philippine cinema, and the industry in general,” he says, “then art will have succeeded in initiating mindset-changing discourse.”
As long as critical thought exists, art will always be relevant. While there may never be a clear way to reconcile the good with the bad or alleviate the discomfort of knowing that someone whose art we love may be unlovable as a person, the discourse sparked is invaluable. “It may not necessarily end peacefully,” Sanchez says, “but the discussion, the interrogation, enriches any artistic experience.”
