If support of the art is in turn supporting the artist in hurting other people, there is no separation, just a lie we tell ourselves to avoid cognitive dissonance.

If the artist is dead, or otherwise unable to hurt people, then and only then is it possible to separate the two

Usually I’m not in the mood anymore after I get to know some artist is an asshole. It’s not like I use my brain and deliberately try to reason about it. Or that I feel hatred towards the book/song now… But I never felt like re-reading Harry Potter after that. Or let Tidal play some artists’ songs. The fun is just spoiled, I guess.

It’s entirely possible to consume art without benefiting the artist. It’s called piracy.

When my grandkids want to watch Harry Potter, JK Rowling doesn’t get a penny from the act of me streaming it on an illegal site.

Case in point I use Piefed because the dev believes in democracy and human rights.

I think the link between the work and the artist is thin but unbreakable.

If you want to understand a literary work, you need to understand its context*. That context includes the author, but also when it was created, the original medium, the culture it’s from… and the readers. Yup, people shape the work as they read it, and sometimes in ways that cancel out what the author said. But the voice of the author is still there. You can’t simply ignore it; at most fight against it, and sometimes win.

Now, let’s say the author is bad, but the work is good. Then it stops being just a literary matter, to become a moral one. It’s all about weighting the harm caused by the author (and, as you said, subsidising that author and their problematic views) versus the benefit that the work itself would give to potential new readers. There isn’t a single right answer that’ll apply to all works, I think.

For example. Lovecraft was a racist piece of shit. But he kicked the bucket already, and his books are in public domain in most countries. So no matter how much you talk about his books, and how many readers pick them up, you aren’t really financing a racist. So I guess it’s fine? One might argue the racism leaks into the work, but remember what I said about readers being able to fight against the voice of the author?

Then there are cases like Harry Potter. We know JK Rowling is a bloody TERF. And if you buy her books, it’s money being given to someone who will use it to promote her shitty views. One might say “just pirate them!”, but plenty people won’t pirate, and they’ll know about the work because you talked about it. Then IMO it’s getting into yucky territory, the odds you’re causing harm by promoting that work are getting bigger, for a relatively small benefit people would get from the work itself.

Just my two cents.

*by “context”, here, I mean everything around the text that shapes its meaning.

Not while they’re alive certainly, and maybe not ever.

Depends.

Is the artist dead? Then sure.

Will they benefit in any way from my support of their work?

Then no.

Did I pay for it before I found out that they were X, Y, or Z?

Then enjoy it, or don’t, just don’t give them more money.

Yeah, I’ve got most of Gaiman’s books. I still think his collab with Pratchet was brilliant. But he’ll never get another cent from me. Roman Polanski? I pirate his shit, he and his estate will never see my money.

The art is not just the thing - it’s impossible to experience it in isolation of it’s context which you’ve constructed from your experiences and feelings and knowledge as well as how the art is situated and framed to you. This might be the point of the Fountain.

So I think it’s impossible to separate the work for the artist if you have knowledge pertaining to them. Michael Jackson was an incredible talent, and his music is significant in my memories of my own childhood, but it hits different for me now. If we played his music to an alien freshly arrived from Mars they might think it’s perfect, but it never can be again for us.

It’s hard as fuck these days.

Minecraft and Notch?

Young Kanye vs Nazi Ye?

American Gods and Neil Gaiman?

Harry Potter and TERF Queen?

The hard part is defining the lines.

Is Louie CK as bad as Cosby?

People apologizing for PewDiePie’s Nazi shit when he was a kid?

I fucking just heard that Andy Weir has some problematic views.

Sorta.

Art, or the more general “thing someone has made” that you’re referring to, can be judged independently of the person. A terrible person can make beautiful music. Much of our cultural heritage was made by people who are rightfully considered to have problematic views, if for no other reason than they were more common then.

Then there’s art as a commercial product. You can’t separate the product from the manufacturer. There’s no way to give someone you think is bad money that doesn’t detract from your statement of disapproval.

Then there’s crime and piracy. When it’s media piracy I’m pretty ambivalent. Seems easier to just not consume stuff made by people you don’t like, but I don’t think it’s “support” in the way that paying is.
When it’s stealing actual physical things, that’s just enjoying the good thing and actually costing them money, which is clearly not supporting anyone. That just kinda makes it funny.
At the extreme end is stuff like “that’s our confederate flag. We got it when we shot a bunch of confederates and took their flag”. Clearly not supportive.

Mixed feelings. I don’t like supporting horrible people but at the same time I simply cannot background check every artist/actor.

Yes and no

Yes insofar as the work really does stand alone - if it was suddenly revealed that Vincent van Gogh was a mass murderer, or a space alien, or a Labrador Retriever, or literally any other thing one might imagine, Starry Night would still look exactly the same.

And no insofar as I don’t want my money going to a piece of shit, and to the degree that I can prevent that from happening, I do.

Not while they’re alive. If they’re long gone, we can talk about it.

If the artist is still alive, then generally no. I don’t support any anti-trans artists because their beliefs and sometimes actions harm me and people I care about. It would be hypocritical and privileged of me to not apply that to artists that harm groups I’m not in.

If the artist is dead however, I’m a bit more flexible. A vast amount of historical artists were sexist or racist or bigoted in some way by modern standards. Not to mention the art the created may be constrained by the norms of the time as well. It would be extremely difficult to find a historical artist without something to take issue with and they’re not actively harming anyone anymore.

Yes, I’m very “death of the artist”. But to me, that mostly means that the artist doesn’t get any more say in what a finished piece of art means than anybody else.

If I like a piece of art, but not the artist that made it, that’s not a contradiction to me. Bad people can still make great art. Take Ace of Base: I’m never going to give them money, but I still listen to “Cruel Summer”. This is a song that is definitely not promoting White Supremacy.