Art on Trial: How Moral Surveillance Replaced Criticism
https://mikecormack.substack.com/p/art-on-trial-how-moral-surveillance
Art on Trial: How Moral Surveillance Replaced Criticism
https://mikecormack.substack.com/p/art-on-trial-how-moral-surveillance
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Submission statement: Art on Trial explores how cultural criticism has morphed into moral surveillance – and what that means for the future of art, imagination, and public discourse. As artists are increasingly judged less for their work and more for their perceived personal ethics, we risk losing our ability to engage with ambiguity, darkness, and complexity. This article argues for a renewed critical literacy — one that treats readers as adults, and imagination as essential to human connection. If we can’t reclaim this space, we may forget how to think freely altogether.
TL,dr “Someone is complaining about cancel culture again”.
The criticism of the author is not “moral surveillance”. It is the realization that by subscribing to an author’s work, you support that author and their beliefs. We live in a consumer society where our choice of what to consume sends a message of what we support, whether we like it or not. Even talking about it online, reviewing it and making content about it, drives engagement towards the author into their favor.
There is also a huge difference between dead authors vs living ones: living ones actively tweet their beliefs. We know JK Rowling is a transphobe because she outright confessed to it. Whereas, you can discover elements of racists elements in, say, Tolkien’s writings but he is usually forgiven for it because he was born 1892. JK Rowling can change her beliefs and apologize. Tolkien is dead and cannot. It makes sense to hold the hateful beliefs of the author that is still alive, it is rather vindictive against an author who is dead and where the problematic issues were beliefs typical of their time. Also, buying a LOTR book will not enrich the dead Tolkien (it will his estate but that’s another topic).
The critic today is not the critic of yesterday, where it was a job and the critic was given the works to critique by some media manager and whose paycheck was steady. While those still positions exist somewhat, they are an eccentricity. The person that watches a movie, or several movies, every day is going to have vastly different ideas and taste than the average person. No, today the critic is someone making a review on a website or on their channel/account/whathaveyou and needs to be engaging over being deep. They are more average person than the professional critic and most people want to know whether the thing they are about to consume appeals to someone that is more like them. Their channel gets engagement and thus money (either through youtube monetization or patreon or whatever). Even if they (wisely) try to seperate their online identity from their actual identity, that online identity is still an identity that can be followed or attacked.
The idea that we no longer talk about an author’s work ,only the author, is also misleading. There are no shortages of in-depth reviews of Harry Potter books. One can find problematic issues with Rowling in her works, not just on her twitter account. The treatment of house-elves in Harry Potter and how the author handles the slavery is very much there. But the “death of the author” stuff? That’s actually the standard way content is often found. Through digital storefronts almost any art is available instantly available anywhere and you need to actually do research to talk about the author.
The issue here today is the combination of identity politics (because it is easier to handle than talking about real issues that require expertise), social media noise-and-outrage over merit-of-content (because you need to post frequently to keep engagement and the algorithm to like you) and misinformation-over-research that has become the norm.