An article in the journal of the American Psychological Association examines how accusing an artist of a crime changes the public's attitude to his works
Participants in the experiment were asked to assess a work of art, then told that its author stood accused of one crime or another, and asked to assess the work afresh, being asked along the way whether the display of this work ought to be restricted. The upshot was that respondents gave stronger support to restricting the display of works by artists accused of sexual offences than of those accused of other crimes, murder included.
Their feelings about the work itself, meanwhile, did not change, and participants liked it no less than before being told of the accusation. In the group told of a sexual offence, however, people put a markedly lower monetary value on the work than in the other groups, although before the accusation was disclosed there had been no such difference. Curiously, participants considered murder the morally graver misdeed, yet punished more severely the artist accused of sexual offences.
It is tempting to read this shift in the scale of social condemnation as progress, as proof that society has matured enough to punish violence against the person in earnest. But think again. The truth is quite the reverse. That murder provokes less public fury than a sexual offence signifies not a growth of universal sensitivity but a displacement of the scale of values. A life taken excites less indignation than a violation of consent and bodily integrity. An attempt on life ceases to be regarded as the supreme evil, and people are in effect taught by degrees to grow callous towards the very fact of a human being's death, to treat murder as something more or less tolerable, or at the very least a list of crimes deemed more dreadful is drawn up. Small wonder, in a culture that is expanding the practice of assisted dying and inclines towards the decriminalisation of the gravest crimes, provided they are committed by certain untouchable categories... Is there, for all that, any logic in the rising importance of bodily autonomy?
