The Atlantic magazine – owned by late Apple founder Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs – asserts that it is “Okay to Like Good Art by Bad People” – citing pederasts and pedophiles such as Oscar Wilde and Roman Polanski as those who need representation. The article even concludes that the debauched behavior is inseparable from the art.
Judith Shulevitz focuses primarily on Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, a book by Claire Dederer considering whether people should continue to enjoy works by moral “monsters”. Readers are told art “transcends the artist” – however depraved.
Shulevitz leads on Oscar Wilde, the Anglo-Irish author and libertine often heralded as something of an LGBTQ icon due the “gross indecency” conviction he incurred in relation to homosexual activities.
To her at least partial credit, Shulevitz concedes that Wilde was more than an innocent victim of Victorian bigotry, as he did not just “sleep with men” but with “rent boys” and what she dubiously describes as “teenage boys picked up for brief trysts.”
The detail is more unpleasant than she wishes to disclose, however, with Wilde accused at trial of having been caught with a 14-year-old boy in his bed at the Savoy Hotel, of “seducing” a boy aged 16, and of taking advantage of a serving boy the same age – Wilde’s defense in court was that the sevant in question was “very ugly” – among other depredations.
“Fifteen and most sweet… every day I kissed him behind the high altar,” he said of one of his child lovers, Giuseppe Loverde, in a lecherous letter penned in Sicily not long before his death aged 46.
Polanski.
Shulevitz also discusses Roman Polanski, the French-born three-time Oscar winner, who has been a fugitive from the American justice system since the 1970s, when he plied a 13-year-old girl with alcohol and drugs at Jack Nicholson’s house and sodomized her.
Hollywood coddled the 89-year-old pedophile for decades, with Quentin Tarantino, for example, saying he did not believe “13-year-old party girls” should be considered victims as recently as 2003.
In conclusion, Shulevitz returns to the words of Wilde himself to justify indulging in the works of such men, whether unquestionably guilty or under a cloud of suspicion.
“I don’t believe you can separate [Wilde’s] aestheticism or his buoyant writing from his role as a sexual nonconformist,” Shulevitz says – a curious way to reframe his pedophilic taste in underage boys – and recommends we “heed his warning about the consequences of a triumph of morality over art: ‘Art will become sterile, and Beauty will pass away from the land.'”
