Censor or Celebrate: What Should We Do With Art by Bad People?

Art holds incredible historical importance, back to times that a lot of us weren’t alive for. Travelling all the way back to cavemen art, to Ancient Greek statues, to Renaissance and 20th century art, there’s a lot that art can tell us about the past that we could never have known otherwise. But while these works of art are usually carefully preserved and put up for public viewing, what do we do when the artists turn out to have been worse people than we initially anticipated? How does our view of their art change, and how should we deal with its significance? 

Censorship seems to be the accepted way forward nowadays. From burning artwork to throwing statues into the sea, it seems imperative that modern-day society never sees any artwork that dictators, such as Hitler, have made. But I’d argue that artwork which has that much cultural significance demands to be seen. In order to understand how truly awful Hitler’s actions are, it’s important not to censor the extreme suffering and pain that he caused. Hiding away his artwork and placing it out of the public eye can cause us to forget; putting his artwork somewhere where it can be seen, without glorifying it, serves as a reminder of how we need to do better going forwards. And I believe this stands for a lot of artwork which has a darker backstory- we are complicit in giving reminders about such awful genocides and wars for the people that died in them.

So does that mean that we should put this artwork on government walls and put them up in our houses? No, absolutely not. There is a difference between putting artwork on display for societal understanding, and putting artwork up for decoration. No matter what we do with their art, it will still hold a lot of historical importance- and putting their artwork up to admire it is immoral and inconsiderate. By keeping those works of art in a gallery setting- somewhere which is renowned for historical observation- the artwork inspires us to think about the artist, rather than simply admire the art. If an artist had an immoral background, their privileges of having their artwork seen purely for aesthetic purposes is no longer possible.

So I believe that artwork by bad people shouldn’t be hushed or covered up; it would only cause ignorance. By putting them in the spotlight, it allows us as a society to educate ourselves on what happened. By giving them attention, we’re making sure people like them aren’t given the power to cause pain again.