How do we think about consuming art or products of people accused of sexual abuse?

Consuming the work is what sustains the position the accused person occupies

Question: How do we think about consuming art or products of people accused of sexual abuse?
Position‹2 of 2: Consuming art or products of people accused of sexual abuse is not ok
Argument1 of 2›: Consuming the work is what sustains the position the accused person occupies

The argument

Proponents of this position begin by rejecting the description of consumption as a private matter of taste. Watching, listening, reading or buying, they argue, is the mechanism by which a career exists at all. An audience is not a bystander to someone's standing; it is the thing that standing consists of. Where a work is paid for, consumption produces income directly. Where it is not, it produces attention, and attention is what makes further work commissionable. On this account the question is not whether a person may privately enjoy something, but whether they wish to continue supplying what keeps an accused person in a position of influence. The argument gains its force from what that position is held to involve. Proponents observe that the opportunity to work closely with people who need something from you is not incidental to many creative and commercial careers; it is their structure. Where allegations concern conduct of that kind, continuing to fund the career is argued to be continuing to fund the circumstances in which the conduct was possible. The objection is therefore prospective as well as retrospective: it is less about desert than about what an audience is helping to arrange next. Proponents accept that any single person's consumption makes a negligible difference, and argue that this misunderstands the kind of obligation at stake. Audiences act collectively whether or not they intend to, and a norm is the sum of individual decisions that each looked inconsequential. On this view declining to consume is not a punishment administered by a consumer, which no consumer is in a position to administer, but a refusal to contribute to something the consumer would not choose to bring about.

Premises

[P1]Consumption of a work produces income, attention, or both, and these are what sustain a career. [P2] The positions at stake typically carry continuing access to people who depend on the holder professionally. [P3] Continuing to fund such a career therefore helps to maintain the conditions in which the alleged conduct occurred. [C] Consuming the work is not acceptable, because it is a contribution to an arrangement the consumer would not choose to bring about.

Counter-arguments

Opponents answer that this makes consumers responsible for outcomes they cannot affect and did not cause, and that responsibility for an institution's decisions belongs to the institution. A second objection is that the harm falls widely: most works involve many people, and withdrawing from one implicates the livelihoods of collaborators against whom nothing has been alleged. Others argue that the position treats an allegation as sufficient grounds for an economic penalty, which inverts the ordinary relationship between finding and consequence, and that an audience is poorly placed to assess which allegations warrant it. A final objection holds that the argument has no stopping point, since on the same reasoning almost every purchase implicates the buyer in conduct somewhere in a supply chain.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Continuing access is a feature of some roles and not others, and the premise generalises from the industries where it holds to every case in which a work has an audience. [Rejecting P3] Funding a career is not the same as maintaining the conditions for misconduct, which are set by employers, contracts and supervision rather than by audiences. [Rejecting C] If contributing to an arrangement one would not choose makes consumption unacceptable, almost no purchase survives the test, and a principle that condemns everything gives no guidance about this case.