On the Unbearable Clean Scent of Contemporary Morality

Nowadays, creating art is no longer enough; it must also be shared. You have to be a good person. Not just a “good artist” — a good human being, one of those who recycles diligently, knows the dates of the right revolutions, and remembers to thank their trans grandmother in acceptance speeches. The artist, who once could be a little weird, reclusive, or even openly unpleasant, has now become a kind of moral influencer: an avatar of ethical values, a walking symbol of civic responsibility.

This demand for public virtue contaminates the very perception of the work. The artist’s body has become a moral code that either legitimizes or taints everything it touches — even retroactively. What was once an admirable painting or a brilliant performance becomes a radioactive artefact, covered in the fingerprints of misconduct. Kevin Spacey, once hailed as one of the most layered and subtly brilliant actors of his generation, was swiftly erased from the canon of reference, as if talent itself had become infected by the DNA of guilt.

This is the ghost of purity: the illusion that only certified goodness can legitimize symbolic value. Roland Barthes reminded us that the author is dead, but we forget that this is true only until the author misbehaves. Susan Sontag spoke of the “appetite for morality” as a cultural addiction: we want art to educate us, to redeem us, to show us the way to salvation. In this framework, the artist stops being a creator and becomes a priest, though without a cassock and with an Instagram account. Judith Butler wrote about gender performativity. But today, we are witnessing the performativity of ethics: it’s not enough to be ethical — one must appear so. Moral behavior is transformed into symbolic capital, a kind of social currency. And the artist, to survive, must carry an immaculate moral wallet.

The Spacey case isn’t really about Spacey. It’s about how society deals with failure, ambiguity, and history. Guy Debord warned us that we live in a spectacle where everything is just an image; now, we live in a moral performance where everything involves judgment. Social critique has become a kind of real-time courtroom reality show, with immediate juries and viral punishments. Preciado might say this is less about justice and more about biopolitical normalization. Meanwhile, Mark Fisher would call it moral capitalist realism: we can’t even imagine any other kind of ethics but this one — hygienic, public, and filled with anxiety. Byung-Chul Han talks about the “society of transparency,” where everything must be visible, clean, and auditable — even the artist’s heart. However, art that seeks transparency is art that rejects shadows, the underground, and the indecipherable. And that, ultimately, is a negation of art itself.

Art has always been created by imperfect hands. Today, the issue is that we’re expected to wear sterilized gloves. Consider figures like Roman Polanski or Woody Allen, whose public condemnation exists in a blurry space between what was proven, what was interpreted, and what was left unsaid. This isn’t about excusing them — but about recognizing that cancelation, unlike justice, offers no appeal or chance for defense. While some still defend these well-known cases, hundreds of lesser-known, anonymous artists have been erased by poorly understood scandals or unfounded rumors. In those cases, art dies with its creator — with no recourse or way to fight back. A lesser-known example is River Medway, a British trans performance artist based in Berlin, whose piece Black Milk, inspired by Jean Genet, used ethnically charged language and unsettling terms as a form of critical dismantling. The goal was to highlight the tension between representation and oppression, but a few decontextualized excerpts circulating online were enough to ignite accusations of insensitivity and racism. The collective she co-founded publicly distanced itself, institutional support disappeared, and the work was removed from a local festival program. There was no room for debate or appeal — only swift exclusion. In this case, cancellation did not punish abuse; it punished ambiguity. And where there is no room for ambiguity, art itself begins to vanish. Caravaggio, for example, lived as a fugitive, involved in street fights, killings, and escapes through dark alleyways. He was a brilliant painter, yes — but also a man who killed in cold blood over a poorly digested honour dispute and beat rivals with the same hand that held the brush. He painted with a dark genius, in blood and shadow — and at the same time with tenderness, vibrancy, and immortality. His violence is not a footnote but part of the drama of his work. The biblical figures he painted seem to have just stepped out of a Neapolitan tavern; the saints have dirt under their nails, and martyrdom smells of sweat and spilled wine. His biographical impurity does not erase his legacy — it shapes his brushstroke.

Wagner was a militant antisemite who composed monumental operas funded by decadent monarchs and spread doctrine as if poisoning lined paper. Yet his portraits still hang in museum halls, and his scores are performed with near-liturgical reverence. Why? Because they died before Twitter (X) existed. This is the illusion of coherence: the idea that artistic greatness must be paired with moral purity as if genius were the result of virtue, or talent a reflection of character. That fiction persists only because historical distance allows us to forgive what no longer directly offends us. It’s easy to excuse Ezra Pound’s racism when he’s no longer alive to shame us with new remarks. What is at stake here is not the behavior itself, but its visibility — and above all, when it becomes visible. Walter Benjamin spoke of the loss of the “aura” of the work of art; today, we’ve replaced it with the aura of behavior. The work matters less than the artist in public mode: moral, transparent, validated. The artist, who was once captivated by their creation, is now judged by what it represents. And coherence, as we well know, is a rare luxury. No one is coherent all the time — except, perhaps, the dead, and even they can be cancelled posthumously with a little effort.

Kevin Spacey had the misfortune of being brilliant in an age that demands permanent and documented integrity. What separates the tolerated from the cancelled is not necessarily the severity of the act, but its alignment or misalignment with prevailing moral codes. A “progressive” artist may stumble without falling. An exotic figure might be excused. But a white man, talented, powerful, and charismatic? That is now almost an ontological provocation.

We tolerate Ridley Scott toasting with Putin, we still programme Polanski in festivals with applause and champagne — because scandal only becomes fatal when it offends hegemonic sensibilities. Morality, like fashion, also has seasons. And what shocks in one year may be rehabilitated in another, so long as the market (or collective memory) permits it.

In this theatre of moral coherence, symbolic gestures weigh more than actions. Naomi Klein once wrote about brand fetishism — now we live in the fetishism of reputation. The artist’s life has become a virtue-signalling campaign. And when the product becomes “de-virtuous,” we demand apologies, purging, and silence. But art was never a customer service. And the artist, with all their contradictions, may well be, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “someone who creates beautiful things — and nothing more. To be moral or immoral is not part of the contract.”

Cancellation is not exactly a death — it is more like a digital purgatory with mirrored walls, where the artist’s image dissolves in real time. There is no formal trial, no right to appeal: just a single accusation, a video clip, a quote taken out of context — and that’s it, the public body of the artist vanishes, as if it had never existed.

It’s not just symbolic exclusion, but a form of accelerated obsolescence. The person becomes toxic, and by contagion, so does their work. Netflix removes, festivals deprogram, archives are withdrawn. It’s as if the cultural machine had an operating system that detects moral viruses and deletes them without warning — not always justly, but always efficiently.

Kevin Spacey was removed from films in which he had already appeared. Not just cancelled from future projects — erased retroactively. Ridley Scott replaced him digitally, as if he had been a casting mistake in a pilot episode. This gesture is telling: the problem is not only the behaviour, but the presence. The body, the face, and the voice become unacceptable. And so they are re-edited, covered, reenacted. As if scandal contaminated the image itself.

Guy Debord would describe this as an advanced stage of the society of the spectacle: it’s no longer enough to watch — we must sanitize what we see. But there is something deeply unsettling about this. Because if art is also a record of its time, moral erasure creates a false history. A history without stains, ambiguities, or gray zones. A history idealized like a carefully curated Instagram feed. The culture of denunciation, though at times just and necessary, often operates like an algorithm of automatic outrage: fast, emotional, binary. The cancelled body is not judged — it is discarded. Denunciation becomes content, scandal becomes commodity, and punishment becomes spectacle. There is a necropolitical impulse at work here, as Achille Mbembe would say: not merely deciding who lives and who dies, but who deserves to exist in symbolic space. And if the artist insists on returning — as Spacey has, through small videos and marginal projects — they are met with suspicion, mockery, or silence. The cancelled body has no right to reconstruction. The culture of purity has no place for the penitent — only the excluded. Like an inverted liturgy, there is no sacrament or redemption: only exile.

And yet, paradoxically, this moral logic is deeply aesthetic. Exclusion helps to maintain the clean image of cultural space, allowing those who remain to continue shining under neutral light. The obsolescence of the cancelled body is the price paid to uphold the illusion of collective purity. It is the ritual sacrifice necessary for the community to feel morally current. The problem, of course, is that no one stays up to date forever.

There is something strange about the way virtue is produced today. It no longer stems from experience or inner transformation — it emanates from visibility. Ethics has ceased to be a relational, slow, imperfect practice and has become an aesthetic performance. Like a luxury brand: the more ostentatious, the more value it acquires.

The virtue factory is everywhere: on social media, in awareness campaigns, behind the scenes of the cultural industries. There are agencies managing image crises, advisors calibrating the tone of regret, and designers choosing the ideal typeface for public apologies. Morality has become branding — and like all branding, it thrives on what it conceals.

In this context, the artist ceases to be a creative subject and becomes a conforming figure. Their survival depends on their ability to emit signals of virtue that are compatible with the zeitgeist. One doesn’t need to be virtuous — only to appear so. Byung-Chul Han would call this a “psychopolitics of positivity”: a morality of surfaces — pleasant, luminous, but without depth.

This is not to relativize ethics, but to criticize its instrumentalization. Donna Haraway wrote about “becoming-with”: a situated, relational ethics that recognizes the complexity of others and the world. But dominant culture prefers cleanliness — a hygienic, distilled, binary morality. Either you are pure, or you are out. And how is this purity produced? Through a rhetoric of repentance and public rituals of expiation that mimic religion without its paradoxes. Everything becomes a performative gesture: an apology video, a tearful interview, a symbolic donation. But none of this heals — it merely repackages.

Giorgio Agamben spoke of the “state of exception” as a normalised condition. Perhaps today we live in a “state of continuous justification,” where all public bodies are suspects until proven otherwise. Proof, of course, is always provisional. The virtue factory is not aimed at recovery — it’s aimed at surveillance.

Within this system, the artist has two options: conform and simulate purity, or maintain their impurity and accept the risk of marginalisation. The first offers safety, but dissolves the critical power of art. The second preserves freedom, but excludes it from circuits of legitimation. And the market, of course, always chooses what sells best — be it certified purity or spectacular downfall.

It is at this point that ethics and aesthetics part ways radically. True art — the kind that compels thought, distrust, hesitation — is rarely compatible with staged virtue. Because art is ambivalent, excessive, unsettling. And dominant morality does not tolerate ambiguity. It wants linear narratives, clear victims, and absolute culprits. It wants uplifting endings — even if they are false.

But art is not a courtroom. And even less a confession.

Art, to work, needs to get its hands dirty. Sometimes even its knees.

It is a profoundly impure activity: it arises from error, excess, desire, and deviation. A painting begins with a stain, a piece of music with a noise, a text with a sentence that doesn’t yet know where it’s going. There is no such thing as purity in the creative act — and thank goodness for that, because what is pure is rarely alive.

But today, culture demands the opposite: art that uplifts, redeems, comforts — and above all, does not offend anyone. Art is expected to behave like a manifesto in elegant layout, like asking a walnut cake to be vegan, gluten-free, anti-colonial, and preferably sugarless. The problem isn’t the cake — it’s that, in the end, it tastes like cardboard.

Oscar Wilde, who knew a thing or two about scandal and talent, once said: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” And Wilde knew what he was talking about — he was imprisoned for being who he was. His crime was existing inconveniently. Not so different from what happens today, just with fewer courtrooms and more trending topics.

David Sedaris wrote a story in which the narrator, after being accused of insensitivity during a writing workshop, decides to write only about trees. Trees that won’t offend anyone — himself or others. He ends up, of course, being criticised for writing about invasive species. That’s the point: purified art loses its oxygen. It has no space left for doubt, for risk, for the grotesque. And without that, what remains is waiting-room art — clean, predictable, and utterly innocuous.

Ivan Illich once warned of the danger of institutions that, in attempting to do good, end up normalising obedience and domesticating thought. The sanitisation of art falls exactly into that territory: an insidious pedagogy that turns the artist into a technician of authorised feelings. Art becomes a moral supplement instead of a space for symbolic conflict.

And yet, it is precisely in its ability to fail, to disturb, to leave us off balance that art transforms us. A film that makes us uneasy, a painting that unsettles us, a text we’re not sure is brilliant or offensive — these are the ones that stay with us. Because they demand internal work — slow, inconclusive. They are like a grain of sand in your shoe: they won’t let you forget you’re alive.

Impure art, in that sense, is profoundly ethical — not because it teaches lessons, but because it takes the ground from under our feet. Because it forces us to confront what doesn’t fit into campaigns. Because it reminds us that being human is messy, contradictory, full of flaws, and unconfessable impulses. And that, despite — or perhaps because of — all that, we still go on creating “beauty.”

Maybe we should just leave artists alone. Not to protect them, but to preserve art itself. So it can continue to be what it has always been: a machine of symbolic rebellion, a space where the world can be examined without moral footnotes, conduct manuals, or universal approval. Art isn’t a spa. It’s a livable ruin.

If we take a moment to reflect, the picture appears clear—or at least disturbingly familiar. We started with the idea of moral purity as an aesthetic benchmark, wandered through the paths of impossible coherence, stumbled over discarded bodies as awkward remnants of a watchful spectacle, analyzed the industrial manufacture of virtue, and concluded with a stubborn defense of art as a space of impurity and ambiguity. If this were a summary, we could stop here. But it isn’t. It’s a scream disguised as an essay. The truth is, we’re living under a laboratory morality—a condensed, packaged, sanitized ethic that tries to separate the good from the bad, much like someone sorting broccoli from French fries. And this morality is far from neutral. It serves very specific interests: legitimizing the symbolic authority of those who can afford to appear virtuous, and excluding those who—by talent, history, or misfortune—don’t fit the mold. The culture industry (whatever that is these days), so concerned with inclusion, loves a domesticated artist. One who knows how to smile in the right photo, voice the right opinions, and preferably not cause trouble after hours. It’s the opposite of art as a zone of risk. It’s art as an ethics-friendly product, with a seal of approval and a user manual.

This is the point where thinking needs to become radical. Not to provoke, but to reclaim freedom. We must state it clearly: aesthetics and ethics are distinct. They can communicate, influence each other, occasionally overlap — but they must not merge. Because when aesthetics bow to morality, art ceases to be a space for experimentation and becomes a public relations tool.

And yes, this means accepting that artists can be foolish, unpleasant, incoherent — or, in extreme cases, genuinely deplorable people. But the rule must be twofold: evaluate the work based on its symbolic power, and judge the person by the justice they deserve — but never combine the two into a quick fix of cancellation. Oscar Wilde, convicted of sodomy, wrote some of the most beautiful lines about human freedom. And it was in prison that he wrote De Profundis — a text that seeks no excuse, no public redemption, only a way to keep thinking. Wilde was a victim of a public morality that called itself virtuous — one that, now recycled, circles once again around our cultural decisions.

The real tragedy is not that we cancel artists — it’s that we’ve grown used to consuming culture like hospital food: no salt, no fat, no risk. And culture, once it ceases to be dangerous, becomes entertainment with civic pretensions. A TED Talk with a soundtrack. A showroom of sensitivities.

Perhaps we ought to relearn how to inhabit impurity. Not out of pity, but because it is the raw material of thought. Because only impurity creates friction. And only friction produces sparks.

In the end, perhaps one idea remains — one that doesn’t fit neatly into an Instagram feed or a press release: art is not a good person. And thank goodness for that.