With the rise of cancel culture, it’s something that’s got me curious, why are so many works (music, literature, tv shows, etc.) no longer separated from their controversial makers? Is it purely to do with money (e.g. not wanting to give money to people you don’t agree with?) and what about controversial people who are dead? They don’t gain anything, so why isn’t the art separated from the artist? What’s your opinion on this topic?


Since Velma was quick and already pretty well defined what we know about cave paintings, I’d actually like to add on to your question since this is one of my favorite topics.
There’s a lot of art out there that was created because artists set out to create something that isn’t specifically political. That’s a little harder to escape politics on because the artists had a motive in mind when they wanted to pursue that goal. Something of note though that was in popular discourse around four years ago though was Zombie Formalism which was shown to be created as a genre of painting used as fiat currency for the wealthiest people to exchange and launder money. While that context is pretty political, if you only look at the intent of the artists they were trying to make art that said as little as possible in order to not draw any attention and be an effective form of untaxed currency. That could be a plausible bet, depending on how you personally invoke Death of the Author
This was a good read, thank you for linking it!
My pleasure, thanks for bearing with me through all the typos in that reply