Ginsberg and Kerouac's (the latter slept with underage girls) art was all about their lifestyle. I'm not sure I see the difference here. They did lots of drugs,

Ginsberg and Kerouac's (the latter slept with underage girls) art was all about their lifestyle. I'm not sure I see the difference here. They did lots of drugs, had sex with children, and wrote about it and the 'insights' they got from their behavior. Their fame and work comes almost entirely from what they were doing. This is not a true premise in the first place. There are a lot of writers, writing great things, who were not bad people. Probably a much longer list of people. Tolkien is a fine 20th century example, but if you have a specific field of writing you want to talk about, we can pull out names for that one. The same is true of other artists. And should we separate the art from the artist? Are artists inspired by some divine muse that speaks through them, or is their writing the fruit of their whole self, personality, life to that point? Should I admire and read the self-expression of a man who believed pedophilia was a noble thing? If that's a fundamental part of his worldview, are the 'nicer' parts of it really independent from that, or is it all conditional, tangled and bound together, part of the whole weltanschauung of one man? Am I not perhaps, in some small way, picking up a little bit of what made him sick even if I ignore the ugliest bits? Certainly it won't affect me the same way - but do I want any part of that inside me?