- Alan Petrillo And I LIKE your stuff!
- Robert Luis Rabello @Alan: Interestingly, many of my readers who consider themselves men and women of faith won't share my books with non-believing friends because they think my writing is "too religious." Yet you describe yourself as agnostic, and you don't have a problem. So, maybe the issue with judging the work, rather than the artist, goes deeper than just nominations for the Hugos.
- Alan Petrillo Definitely!
Judge the work not the artist.
How many times does this have to be said in the creative community?
The current venue is the Hugo Awards. It seems a lot of people are up in arms that works by noted right-wingers Larry Correia and Vox Day are on the ballot. Other people are upset that Correia’s and Day’s works were nominated for political reasons, because they’re trying to prove the point that writers who personally express a preference for the politics of the Right can’t win Hugo Awards.
My opinion is that the work should be judged on its own merits, regardless of the political leanings of the artist. Or the gender of the artist. Or the sexual orientation of the artist. Or the race of the artist. Or any parameter of the artist.
I disagree with Correia’s politics, but what stories of his that I’ve read have been pretty good. I am unfamiliar with Vox Day’s work, and I think the man who wears the nom de plume is a walking example of everything that is wrong with the Right Wing, but I’m willing to put that aside to judge his work on its own merits.
They’re in pretty good company. I like many of the works of Orson Scott Card, but his politics make me scratch my head. I was a member of his website, The Intergalactic Medicine Show, for a while, but I had to drop my membership because the wingnuttery just got too much for me. My fellow Necronomican, Chris Berman, also makes me scratch my head, because it never ceases to amaze me that such a brilliant man, who writes such good SF, can have a head full of such messed up ideology.
Judge the work not the artist. After all, the visual art community likes to ooh and ah over the works of Vincent Van Gogh despite the fact that the man himself was a syphilitic, drug-addicted pedophile. The same for Paul Gauguin. He abused his wife, didn’t support his kids, screwed everything in a skirt, fathered more bastards than Robert Baratheon, and had a penchant for 13 year old girls, but his work is still lauded by the art community. The visual art community is replete with detestable people who are nonetheless lauded for their art. Why should the literary art community be any different?
Judge the work, not the artist!
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