Debris of Separation

SEPARATE THE ART FROM THE ARTIST. That is the procedure so often suggested for the ethical dilemmas presented by works of art whose makers break bad. Caravaggio, we are reminded, was probably a murderer—for that, would we deny ourselves The Supper at Emmaus (1601)? It gets slipperier when living practitioners of violence might yet benefit, in capital or status, from our consumption or appreciation of their art or might solicit our effective complicity in their deeds from our engagement with it. The separation of art from artist can be given a reassuringly cerebral sheen with an invocation of the close readings proposed by the mid-twentieth-century American school of New Criticism, whose adherents suggested that a body of literature is best understood as an exclusively self-referential and self-contained phenomenon in its ethics as much as its aesthetics. From the French literary criticism once fashionable among architects, no assertion is more famous than the one made by Roland Barthes, in his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” that “literature is that … oblique i…