Nick Cave comments on separating the art from the artist
Australian musician Nick Cave has commented on the issue of boycotting songs written by controversial figures and the importance of separating the art from the artist.
Speaking at Hay Festival, Cave commented: “Making art – especially making music – it prevents you from becoming the worst aspects of your character, and that’s why I very much think we need to be very, very careful about the music we don’t think people should listen to any more because of what the artist who has made that music may have been like.”
In a critique that urged people to separate the art from the artist, the 65-year-old said: “We need to understand that the songs themselves are the best of them” and we should not “eradicate the best of these people in order to punish the worst of them”.
Cave said that his cautious approach to ‘progress’ stems from the grief of losing two son’s recently. “I believe that we need to be cautious about the idea of progress. I just see things moving very rapidly and a whole lot of different things worry me a lot, like AI,” he said.
Continuing: “I think that I have an understanding of loss and what it is to lose something and how difficult it is to get that back.”
However, he was quick to clarify that he is not against progress itself merely how carefree we are at embracing it without looking at the costs and seemingly the callousness he claims it imbues. “There are huge problems in the world that we really need to deal with” – however, he disagrees with “the idea that everything is systemically fucked”.
The current heightened judgement of people and the conclusion as a species we are morally corrupt he believes is “not only wrong but disturbing and it’s becoming a problem”. He ties this to recent societal changes. “I think we got rid of religion, essentially, which may or may not be a good thing, but there’s a vacuum that we created that we don’t really know what to do with,” he concluded.
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