The Atlantic magazine has declared that the world would be a “boring and sterile” place without the art created by pedophiles, and we should appreciate and support pedophiles who produce good art by buying their books and tickets to see their films.
The article by Judith Shulevitz 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 depraved behavior is inseparable from the art and that “Art will become sterile, and Beauty will pass away from the land” if we place more importance on morality than art.
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In her analysis, Shulevitz primarily explores the book “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma” by Claire Dederer, which delves into the question of whether people should still appreciate the creations of morally flawed individuals.
The readers are confronted with the notion that art can surpass the moral character of its creators, no matter how corrupted and evil they may be.
Shulevitz specifically focuses on Oscar Wilde, the Anglo-Irish author and libertine, who is often celebrated as an LGBTQ icon due to his conviction for “gross indecency” relating to his involvement in homosexual activities with underage boys.
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 servant 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 and the “13-year-old party girls”
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.’”
