Sean “Diddy” Combs was once one of the biggest names in American pop culture. For a time, his presence was almost inescapable. Not only did he have several hits of his own, under his former stage name Puff Daddy, but his record label, Bad Boy Entertainment, produced some of the iconic hip-hop albums of the 1990s and 2000s. He also founded a TV network, launched a successful clothing company, became the face of a popular liquor brand and threw parties that some of the world’s biggest celebrities rearranged their calendars to attend.
Today, though, his public persona has been overwhelmed by allegations of how he has conducted his private life. Combs is currently standing trial in Manhattan on five criminal counts, including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. Federal prosecutors have accused him of carrying out an extended campaign of abuse against women that included coercing them to participate in marathon sex parties, while using threats of violence and the power of his business empire to cover up his misdeeds. If convicted, he could end up spending the rest of his life in prison.
Combs is far from the first celebrity to face allegations of horrific personal conduct. Whenever such claims arise, they force us to reconsider a beloved artist’s work in light of their alleged behavior.
Just how much do charges of misconduct affect how people view an artist’s creative output? Can we really “separate the art from the artist,” or does one’s personal behavior inevitably tarnish their creative legacy?
These questions have existed for a long time. Some of history’s greatest artists have been accused of doing truly awful things. But the debate has become more pointed in recent years, in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the backlash against cancel culture.
Combs’s case shows how complicated these situations can be. When the allegations against him first came to light, streaming numbers for his music plummeted, but they actually increased in the wake of his arrest.
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll offers a glimpse into how Americans make sense of celebrities’ behavior and how it influences their entertainment decisions. Rather than providing a definitive picture, the survey of 1,560 adults shows just how complicated these considerations can be and how divided we are in how we respond when the artists we love are accused of conduct we abhor.
Misconduct matters, but responses vary
In the survey, which was conducted May 22-27, an overwhelming majority of people said that an artist’s personal behavior can influence their choice of whether to watch their movies, listen to their music or otherwise engage with their art. That doesn’t mean that they write off the work of any celebrity who faces allegations of misconduct, though. For most people, the specific circumstances are what matter. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said their choices depend on the artist and what they’re accused of. Only 21% said that they will automatically abandon artists who do things they don’t approve of “because you can’t separate the artist from the art.” Just 12% believe an artist’s personal behavior doesn’t matter at all “because the art and the artist are separate things.”
While it’s clear that an artist’s actions inform how most people view their work, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will avoid it entirely if they disapprove of their behavior. Less than half of respondents (47%) said they have personally stopped consuming at least one artist’s work because of things they have done. Nearly the same number (45%) said they have not.
The nature of allegations matters as well. Sexual assault involving children was unsurprisingly the top reason respondents listed for why they stopped consuming an artist’s work. Extreme political views, sexual assault involving adults, racism and domestic violence also ranked high on the list of “cancelable” offenses.
While all of these various factors appear to matter to some degree, it’s not clear which one carries the most weight when it comes to specific artists. For example, sexual assault against children is viewed as the most egregious offense, but just 11% of people in the survey said they had stopped listening to music from Michael Jackson — who was accused of molesting multiple children during his lifetime. Three times as many people (33%) said they had stopped consuming R. Kelly’s work in light of a string of sexual abuse claims involving minors that he has faced.
Recency, familiarity, age and politics play a role here too. When given a list of celebrities who have faced high-profile allegations of wrongdoing, more respondents said they had stopped consuming Combs’s art than any of the other options, possibly because reminders of those accusations are all over the news right now.
Generational differences showed up in the results as well. Americans over 65 were more forgiving across every type of allegation — with the exception of drug use or excessive drinking, which they viewed as disqualifying at a higher rate than any other age group. Older people were also more likely to say they had stopped consuming work from Bill Cosby, who was a massive star in their generation before being accused of sexual assault by dozens of women.
Despite Gen Z’s purported reputation for hypersensitivity, younger people were either equally likely or less likely than millennials or Gen X-ers to say that they would stop consuming an artist’s work across all different types of allegations — including anti-LGBTQ statements and sexism.
At first glance, politics doesn’t seem to be that big of a factor, but its influence really starts to show when you zoom in a bit. Democrats, Republicans and independents were equally likely to say they had abandoned an artist because of their behavior. Which artists and the kind of behavior varies dramatically, though. Just 5% of Republicans said that anti-LGBTQ statements had caused them to stop consuming an artist’s work, compared with 34% of Democrats. GOP voters were also less likely to cite racism, sexism, domestic violence and sexual assault involving adults as reasons to give up an artist.
The same is true when it comes to most individual artists, with particularly large gaps for celebrities who have expressly aligned themselves with President Trump. For example, seven times as many Democrats (30%) as Republicans (4%) said that they have stopped watching films starring Mel Gibson, who has faced various accusations of making antisemitic and racist comments statements over the years and whom Trump named as a “special ambassador” to Hollywood in the early days of his second term.
Emotions and logic
Researchers have been studying whether humans can separate art from artists for decades. For the most part, they have found that we can’t.
Studies consistently show that our moral judgments on individuals influence how we view things that are associated with them. Part of that is the result of high-level thinking, where we carefully weigh our appreciation of the art against our distaste for the artist’s actions.
But the process also happens at a more visceral, unconscious level. In one famous experiment from the 1990s, most test subjects refused to put on a sweater after being told to imagine that it belonged to Adolf Hitler, under the illogical belief that they would somehow be contaminated by his evil if they did.
“If a person does something that I find to be really repugnant, morally speaking, then I will have an unconscious sense that close, intimate contact with things they’ve created may affect or corrupt me in some vague, hard to specify manner,” James Harold, a professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College and the author of the book Dangerous Art, told Yahoo News.
Thanks to technological advances, we can now see this process at work on a biological level. Researchers in Germany recently found that people instinctively viewed classical paintings as lower in quality when they were told about bad things the artists had done in their lives.
“These artworks are processed differently at the neural level. … This shift in brain activity happens very quickly, during the early stages of perception and emotional processing,” Hannah Kaube, a doctoral candidate at the Humboldt University of Berlin who helped lead the study, told Yahoo News. “This suggests that the effect is not just conscious, but occurs spontaneously and automatically.”
Brain scans showed that the unflattering information caused an instant emotional change in the subjects, reflecting that they now viewed the work more negatively. Interestingly, though, those same scans found that work by “bad” artists was also more arousing. Brain activity that’s typically associated with more thoughtful, deliberate thinking was not triggered by the information.
“People may not even realize their feelings about the artwork are being shaped by what they know about the artist — but their brain shows that it is,” Kaube said.
To cancel or not to cancel?
So if nearly all of us carry our judgments of an artist’s behavior with us when we consume their art, why are some people able to still enjoy it while others feel obligated to give it up?
“The concept of ‘separating art from the artist’ can be considered along two interconnected dimensions: whether people should separate the two (an ethical question), and whether they actually do (a psychological one),” said Kaube, who only focuses on the second dimension in her research.
Some of the explanations are straightforward. It’s a lot easier to shun an artist if you’re not a fan of their work in the first place or if you’re of an age where they weren’t really a big star to your generation. It’s probably not a big ask for the average 20-year-old to stop watching Woody Allen movies over his adopted daughter’s claim that he sexually abused her, for example.
There’s also the fact that a lot of people simply don’t believe that the allegations against a celebrity are true or don’t think that what they’re accused of is that big of a deal. Some celebrities have very successfully turned public opinion in their favor after being targeted with allegations of misconduct.
Our reactions are also a reflection of how we see ourselves, Harold argues.
“Much of the separating the art from the artist is expressive behavior,” he said. “It has to do with a person’s self-conception, who they think they are. … We associate art as expressing something about the humanity of the person who made it, and so then you don’t want to be affiliated with that human being.”
External factors can also play a big role. Shared fandom can be a potent source of community in the digital age. So when allegations come out, fan groups often process the news collectively, which can influence any individual member’s decisions.
“Refusing to engage with the work of somebody who you recently learned has done something bad can be a way of expressing your concern for other members of the group,” Harold said. Those dynamics can work in the other direction too, pushing members to keep engaging with a maligned artist in order to avoid losing a community they care about.
Institutions can also influence our responses. When a museum, studio or entertainment venue announces that they will no longer work with a certain artist, that sends a broad message that their actions are disqualifying. If that doesn’t happen, it can create the implication that the artist’s behavior might not be so bad.
One of the nation’s most powerful institutions, the legal system, still hasn’t registered its final judgment on Combs, which could prove to be the most important factor in how the public ultimately views his music. The accusations have already affected his standing. Nearly half of the respondents in our poll (47%) said the allegations had changed the way they view him as an artist. In the end, though, it’s reasonable to expect that a guilty verdict would cause even more people to question whether his songs really deserve a spot on their playlists.