By Angelina Tang
The other day, I had a rather interesting conversation with a few companions at Kleinhans. In one way or another, we stumbled upon the topic of J.K. Rowling, and how being inspired by her work and expressing said inspiration quickly becomes a slippery slope. Harry Potter was a staple of many of our childhoods, after all; despite knowing Rowling is an open transphobe and TERF who put anti-Semitic sentiments in a book series marketed towards children, it’s hard to forget the warmth we associate with reading her books and watching the movies. Harry Potter has undeniably made a huge impact on popular culture in the last two decades… but should we invalidate all of the hope it created in boycotting Rowling?
For many of us, separation of the art and the artist is difficult, to a degree. Without any knowledge of the artist, it’s entirely possible to appreciate good art, admiring the technique and thought that went into it. Take this piece of digital art drawn for promotion of a Japanese video game I enjoy, for instance (see Ax); it looks cool, and the skill required to draw something like this is nothing to be sneezed at. However, now I tell you that the artist has also created drawings depicting child pornography. Now their art is not so nice to look at, is it? There is always a psychological link one forms between the artist and the art. When you see the Mona Lisa, you think Da Vinci; when you hear Anti-Hero, you think Taylor Swift; when you read It, you think of Stephen King. It’s impossible to entirely sever the connection between the two when the two entities have built each other up so heavily. It’s impossible to not associate the artist with their art.
And yet, Harry Potter feels different. We grew up with it; the art was part of our own childhoods, our own upbringing. Rowling didn’t make all those statements and ruin her reputation until after the series was completed, so our first impressions and memories of that work were untainted. Undoing all of these images is much harder than looking at something new and attaching an association to a known artist. We had a predisposed, pure image of Harry Potter, an association with Rowling that was entirely positive, before that negative association threatened our fully-formed ideas. Human beings are stubborn—changing a belief is harder than creating a belief, so we struggle to let go of Harry Potter with the same ease that accompanied letting go of that piece of artwork I showed earlier.
In a way, in that creation of the initial association, we as the consumers of art reclaimed it as our own. We developed our own opinions on the characters, the themes, the story. We, as fans, create fan-art, painting the personalities and appearances of the characters in more vivid detail, writing headcanons and fan works that continue the story and keep the wizarding world alive well after the seventh book is shut. In a way, we become artists. The art becomes something that cannot be taken away from us because we feel as if we created and thus own part of it. This is the perspective of those who separate art and artist—as consumers, we can reclaim the unproblematic parts of the work and cling to the memories we made through it, while still rejecting the real artist.
The problem with this, however, is that such reclamation of the work is still inherently support for the artist. By publicly displaying love for it, you invite new viewers to further consume the artist’s work, thus perpetuating the growth of their popularity and fan base. This is the exact opposite of what we want to happen to the artist—that being, to fade into obscurity. Any interaction with their work only profits them; royalties can be earned from all officially licensed goods, and bootleg fan creations can always be copyrighted or shut down by the artist. For instance, the Wizarding Weekend event in Ithaca, NY was shut down by Rowling and Warner Bros inc. for copyright.The conflict between art and the artist, and the level of separation between the two, is one that will likely never find a true solution. Even as AI art grows, we can always attribute this seemingly artist-less art to the AI program that generated it, or the person who programmed the AI, and that’s a whole other can of worms. For now, the debate will continue to rage… but we can all agree that J.K. Rowling is unfortunately most likely profiting a lot from her self-inflicted controversy and clout.
