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It sounds like your fourth paragraph is exactly what Auden was disagreeing with. But I think there's also room to consider if the act of creating the work/art

It sounds like your fourth paragraph is exactly what Auden was disagreeing with. But I think there's also room to consider if the act of creating the work/art encompassed some of the abhorrence. Like, if a non-abhorrent movie had an abhorrent production. That has an extra wrinkle compared to Pound's poetry. Because then it could be argued that the abhorrence was instrumental in the art's creation, even if the art itself was ostensibly innocent.

munificent 6y ago
> It sounds like your fourth paragraph is exactly what Auden was disagreeing with. True, but Auden wrote his paragraph in the context of a different information technology environment. Today, say artist X puts out objectionable content Y and harmless content Z. You could argue that consuming Z is all fine and dandy (side-stepping questions of whether financially supporting X is a good idea) because you are not supporting Y. But the giant AI neural net models around us aren't so smart. The more views Y gets, the more it starts suggesting Z to other people. In a world where simply consuming a work also literally boosts its signal and the signals of all other works by that artist, the question of whether a non-offense of work should be shunned takes on a very different character.