Therefrom, therefore ...

They say there was a time when artists were simply artisans. Nobody cared very much about an artist's name, background, upbringing, personality, appetites, political views, chest measurement, hat size. What did all of that matter, so long as the artworks were good? We don't ask after the personal minutiae of other hirelings, do we? That was back then. (And already by classical times artists had become names.) Nowadays we're at the other extreme. What does it matter if an artwork is good? (And what does 'good' mean anyway? Hah!) All that matters is a name, famous or infamous. An artist may exhibit a bag of garbage so long as he has a name. (However, that bag of garbage may be thrown out by the night cleaner—a truly newsworthy story.) Well, 'good' means what it has always commonsensically meant. And it is time that we put again some distance between the artist and his artwork, though not too much.

All too often we say that bad artworks are good, because we take the artists themselves to be good, not qua artists, but in some other way. Then we say that good artworks are bad, because we take the artists to be bad, not qua artists, but in some other way. Tsk, tsk. We may be ashamed of an artwork's parenting, of its birthplace, its provenance, of the rundown carriage that carried it to us—no matter. The artwork is its own standalone thing. How it came cannot change what it is (ex post facto). And if we can't see the what for the how, for the wherefrom, then so much the worse for us. Yes, if you're looking at a painting in a gallery, and a fellow gallerygoer tells you of the painter's turpitude, that he was vicious qua man (though virtuous qua painter), then what you see will probably change, though that at which you look is unchanged. And that's OK. We're not superobjective thingamabobs, after all. But don't let's visit the sins of the father on his children. Don't let's go searching for what isn't there, lest we find it, as hypochondriacs find diseases, diseases that aren't there but may as well be. (Wagner's 'Gesamtkunstwerks,' for example, have been constantly maltreated in this way.)

Note: The 'genetic fallacy' is the go-to fallacy these days. It's a real workhorse. For example, biological taxonomy is now phylogenetical, rather than morphological, and so genetic fallacies run roughshod over it. (Some Animalia are classed as Plantae, etc.) Moreover, Darwinists are forever telling us that we're really no greater than other animals. Why? Because we all have common ancestries and we all came by way of natural selection on random genetic mutation! But what we have here is another textbook genetic fallacy. Suppose the evolutionary anthropologist's just-so story is true, the story about humankind's wherefrom and whereby. Do we then become something other than what we here and now are (viz., rational animals)? Is phylogenesis morphology? Is efficiency formality? No, no, no.