The boundaries of fandom

So, your favourite writer/singer/comic is amonster? Here's how to separate the art from the artist and not get trapped when a hero topples

- Christalle Fernandes

Let's take stock of where our heroes stand, shall we? Author JK Rowling has revealed herself to be a raging transphobe. The late novelist Alice Munro, her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner has revealed, knew her husband was sexually abusing Skinner as a child, and did nothing to stop it. Multiple women have accused Neil Gaiman of sexual assault. Rapper Snoop Dogg has been arrested for illegal drug possession, holding firearms, and vandalism, but was one of the promoters of the Paris Olympics. Hollywood still can't decide whether Woody Allen raped his young adopted daughter in 1992.

Where does that leave fans of the works these people have created or helped create? It's not always a good-bad binary. But through the outpouring of rage, some guidelines are emerging.

Ownership rights

Jerry Pinto, poet and novelist, believes that no work of art books, music, TV shows, even a stand-up comedy act - can be viewed from a black-and-white moral perspective. "Art is really an invitation to making a deeper connection with yourself," he says. "And how you find that connection becomes part of the story." So, what matters is our association with the work, not the morals of the person who made it.

Pinto says he watched Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (2017), in which Gadsby calls out artist Pablo Picasso for being a misogynist. It got him to re examine his views on Picasso's emotionally and physically abusive behaviour. "But at a museum in Los Angeles, facing one of his paintings, I knew he had the same spell on me as before."