It is better to not focus on the artist and create a cult of personality

The argument

This argument holds that audiences should continue consuming the work of accused artists while withdrawing something else: their veneration. It is better, proponents argue, not to focus on the artist at all — because the cult of personality around creators is itself part of the problem, and judging art on its own merits avoids feeding it. The cult of personality is what turns artists into untouchable figures. When audiences fuse the work with the person — idolising the genius behind the film or the song — they create exactly the conditions in which abuse flourishes: stars surrounded by enablers, shielded by their indispensability, confident that adoration will outweigh accusation. The #MeToo era's revelations were not only about individual men but about industries and fan cultures that elevated them beyond accountability. Responding to those revelations by focusing yet more attention on artists' personal lives — this one a saint, that one a monster — keeps the same machinery running, merely with the moral signs reversed. The alternative is to decentre the creator altogether. A film or an album is the work of hundreds of people and, once released, has a life independent of its maker. Judging it as a work — taking what is valuable in it without worshipping or even much considering the person behind it — lets audiences keep the art while starving the celebrity cult that protected abusers. Consumption without idolisation withdraws the thing that actually conferred impunity: not the ticket price, but the pedestal. From this standpoint, the moral lesson of the scandals is not to purge catalogues but to stop building pedestals. Because it is better not to focus on the artist and create a cult of personality, this argument holds, we can continue to consume the art.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument proposes a change of attitude while leaving the material relationship untouched. Consumption is not only veneration: streams, tickets, purchases and views route money and continued market power to the accused and to their estates, and that is the mechanism most critics of continued consumption are actually pointing at. Withdrawing the pedestal does not withdraw the royalty. An audience that keeps paying while declining to admire has changed what it feels, not what it funds. The account of how impunity was secured is also partial. Fan adoration played a part, but the documented protections were institutional — non-disclosure agreements, private settlements, contractual leverage, studio and label power, and the professional cost of speaking. Those structures are not dissolved by individuals adjusting their relationship to celebrity, and treating audience attitude as the operative cause understates what the investigations found. Decentring the creator is harder to do than the argument allows. The auteur framing that confers protection is also what makes a work legible as that artist's work — it is why the catalogue is theirs, why it is marketed under their name, and why the question arises at all. Audiences who continue consuming generally continue attributing. There is also a mismatch worth noting: this argument sits under a position holding that nothing can be changed, yet it advocates a deliberate strategy for changing how audiences relate to artists — a claim that something can be changed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Consuming without idolising still routes revenue and market power to the accused, so it withdraws admiration rather than the material support that critics object to. [Rejecting P1] The protections documented in these cases were largely institutional — settlements, non-disclosure agreements, contractual and professional leverage — and are not dissolved by individual audiences adjusting their attitude to celebrity.