We have a new sensibility these days. Cancel what we do not like. Cut off the creator if something about them troubles us. It is often well intentioned but it can drift into extremism, either misguided or misdirected. I understand the impulse. We do not want to support someone who has done harm. We do not want our enjoyment to feel like an endorsement. Still, it creates its own problems. I learned as a child that separating the art from the artist was not only possible but sometimes necessary. My grandmother, for example, disliked Charlie Chaplin. It was a normal thing for that cohort of Americans back in those years. But I adored him as a kid. Later I learned her reasons were assumptions and misunderstandings common in her era about him, the same misunderstandings that helped push Chaplin away from America, to France. She was not malicious, but a truly great person. I wouldn't be who I am today if not for her. She was simply reacting to what she thought she knew. That was my first lesson in how easily cultural judgments can drift off course. Now I face my own version of that dilemma. For most of my life I admired Woody Allen. I grew up on his work in the 1960'/70s and on. I loved the humor, the timing, the neurotic charm. Then the allegations surfaced in the public square and I felt myself recoil. As we all did. Suddenly those same films, especially one like _Manhattan_ , became even more uncomfortable than he originally intended. I would think about what I knew now when viewing it. Or what I thought I knew now. The story made the art feel different. He shared with us in his films his inner turmoils and made fun of them. But they were also insights to his development. Much of it was simply humor, made up, but between and within the scenes were realities. So what do we do with that. What is the healthy way to navigate it. One approach I have considered, and I admit it may be misguided, is simply not to support an artist financially until after they die. The logic is that I can appreciate the art without directly rewarding the person while they are alive. I can minimize the sense of moral compromise. But that quickly gets tangled. What if they outlive me. What if the accusations are false. What if the truth is complicated, as it often is. It becomes a dysfunctional loop, and it does not really address anything. The deeper issue is that every one of us has to sort out where our boundaries are. We have to decide what kind of participation feels right. There is no perfect rule. The extremes are simple. Total cancellation on one side. Total disregard for the artist's behavior on the other. Everything meaningful happens somewhere in the middle. What about artists from before I was born, like Chaplin? What about those before America was born? Or before Rome was? Artists where we do not know what their history was, or abuses were? Do we discard those brilliances of human endeavor? Here is what I have come to. Art can be transformative. It can outgrow its creator. It makes statements about not just the artist, but humanity itself. It can speak truths the artist never fully embodied. We risk losing that when we purge our culture of every creator who failed morally, because by that standard we lose almost everyone. Many of the artists we admire from centuries past would not survive modern scrutiny. Their work does, because we allow it to. We separate. We contextualize. We acknowledge complexity. At the same time we do not have to pretend the artist is admirable. We do not have to celebrate them as people. We do not have to keep giving them money. We do not have to keep them alive culturally if we believe harm outweighs benefit. But we can still admit the art mattered to us without feeling guilty or complicit. What IF we could know all the bad these artists, and that includes writers, filmmakers, all art...and we cancelled all of them? How would that cripple humanity? Stifle creativity? Advancements? Maturing as a culture, as a species? For me the most honest way forward is this. I try to hold two truths at once. The art may have value. The artist may have done harm. I can sit with both. I can choose when or if I want to watch something again. I can choose whether I support them going forward. I do not need to erase what their work once gave me. I also do not need to excuse anything. This is not a clean or perfect answer. But it is human. We are all trying to figure out how to preserve the best of our culture without pretending away the worst of our people. Maybe the point is not finding a final rule but staying awake to the complexity. Art is often messy. Artists are almost always messy. So are we. So are we all. If we can stay mindful of that, we can avoid both extremes. We can avoid blind support and we can avoid the purity tests that erase everything but our outrage. The world is complicated. Our responses can be too. It's a working problem we will have to deal with throughout the rest of our lives and the rest of humanity's existence. Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie! Compiled with aid of ChatGPT