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.
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".
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 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.
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 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.'"
WATCH:
https://thenationalpulse.com/2023/06/04/watch-antifa-attacks-saw-dozens-injured-this-weekend/
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