The Ethics of Consuming Media in Bad Ways or as a Bad Person

Wow, what a question. So, how does one be "invited"? The last time I checked, art galleries welcome visitors, movie theaters and live theaters sell tickets with no criteria other than cash or a credit card.

We have no idea at the outset, what "consumers" will do with the art nor to we have much control over them.

The last time I heard of anybody being "disinvited" since the beginning of the civil rights era, aside from obvious intoxication or disorderly behavior, was never. What it amounts to would be some combination of censorship and/or discrimination. On a personal level, Cosby and Polanski are off of MY list, as is Clint Eastwood and some others, but I'm not OK with them being banned or considered to be "unethical".

Fortunately we have not gotten there yet.

I merely offer this as an actual example (it was actually the premier for Wakanda Forever that had this social media activism) of disinvited viewers to establish that we're not in the realm of pure hypotheticals.



If I squint hard enough, I can kind of see it. Imagine that you got smashed with all your college buddies and decided to go see a kids' movie on opening weekend just for giggles.Your crew is in line to buy the last 15 tickets just in front of a mom with two beaming children who have been dying to see this film for weeks. Would it be better to speak up and encourage your bros to buy tickets for another film so that the kids don't have to leave crestfallen? Would you make way for Tiny Tim and Tiny Tina?

Would you make way for Tiny Tim and Tiny Tina?

I think it's a loaded question to ask whether it's ethical to let Tiny Tim into a children's movie.






No?

Holy cow, what if Corax is Sexy?

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Nah, Corax has been with us for years.

I remember a poster named Lovesexy.



At any rate, I unmasked at this ball years ago.

Yea...no.

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This is not always the case. Historically, people have been legally discluded from some artistic venues on the basis of ethnicity, melanin, and religion and so on. Moreover, there are contemporary thrusts at hierarchy and segregation (usually in the name of fighting it).

Don't crow too much about the status quo. It is not a certainty that the law will always favor freedom. And activist artists will lead the way if and when the worm turns.

Next, please remember that our question is ethical and not legal. Thus, even if no one else requests that you do something, you may have a duty to do it anyway (e.g., a child drowning in a neighbor's pool is an emergency which may not be accompanied by a formal request for you to aid the child).
This is not entirely true, is it? Movie disks sometimes have unskippable adverts. Sesame Credit in China offers the government the ability to punish your credit score if you make untoward comments about the state, or associate with people who do. The West's ubiquitous use of credit and smartphones is placing us in a similar position (e.g., protesting truckers in Canada had their bank accounts frozen). Play an online video game? Well, they have control of your user experience and can (and will) terminate your online account if you pick a bad name, say a bad thing, etc., relative to their POV. Our future is one where certain parties will have the ability to exercise considerable control not only over art, but over all human expression.
What kind of list? How does this list govern your consumption? Is this list rational? Would it have binding normative force on a reasonable person of goodwill or is it just random?

So since this thread isn't about people being actually excluded from anything legally, and is all about the 'ethics' of movie consumption, I guess we're all good to continue here.


Or is it just me who is noticing this conversations 'slow' 'pivot' towards how these supposed ethics will eventually be used by governments to punish citizens who don't agree with their politics. Oh, and that every example being given is about a lefty being mean to right wing causes, almost as if some random B52s example (which I can hardly find any actual example of while googling) is much more convenient than mentioning any instances where the right has overtly threatened the left wing.


Please carry on. He's clearly not doing the thing he always does, yet again.

I am merely pointing out that the present is not exhaustive of the possible. "Well, we don't do that today!" is no proof of what might be done in the future.
Feel free to offer additional examples. I'd be happy to entertain examples that lean in the other direction.

Regardless of the politics of the artist, if the artist tells me that I am not welcome to participate as others, that does give me pause. For example, I would not crash a "women's only" art exhibition (link in prior post). However, some people are willing to skirt the rules for some events (e.g., this one).

And we do self-regulate in some areas. Back in the day, all the suburban white kids were bumping NWA and rapping along (including all the various uses of the N-word), whereas now the mere mention of the word is considered use, meaning that singing/rapping along to some tracks in public (or what people would confess to doing in private) is now taboo. This is a change in our pattern of consumption. And unless you're petitioning for an "N-pass" on this particular point, we have to shrug and note that this is an acceptable change to how we personally self-regulate our consumption of art.

Nah, Corax reads like a lawyer writing a baffling legal brief designed to be coyishly unreadable.
Sexy read like Erma Bombeck after her third pot of coffee and second bloater of lsd.

So your response is you can't think of anything yourself?


And yet, somehow, the ****ing B52's are on your radar.


Tell me you've been bumping NWA and singing along with it without telling me you've been bumping NWA and singing along with it.

This reminds me, I should listen to the B52's


I am, after all, invited.

Just so we are clear, Corax isn't permitted to listen to this.

Well, I posted here with Sexy Celebrity, I knew Sexy Celebrity from posting here, I considered Sexy Celebrity a MoFo friend of mine... and, sir... Corax is no Sexy Celebrity.

- great moments in debate history!

There are certainly "wrong" ways of consumption, but isn't or shouldn't be an issue to the general viewer be they bad or tactless. In public spaces there should be a level of sanity, like for example not to wear a Hitler T-Shirt at a showing of Schindler's List. In private, anything goes, and if it's truly erroneous, the negative payback will be dished out eventually through the gnarled roots of misunderstandings.

My response is that I am not going to perform additional labor for you to pass some sort of ideological purity test.

Again, feel free to offer your own examples. Add something productive to a conversation for a change. Branch out a little bit.
Just something I happened to remember. It struck me. It's one thing when Bobby McFerrin asked the RNC to stop using "Don't Worry, Be Happy" in the Reagan era. He has an IP stake in that song and he has some stake in how that song may be used to platform ideas or sell products. It's a different thing entirely when an artist tells a portion of the public to not consume their art.

Here's another example. Pink was upset about Roe vs. Wade being overturned and so she said this on Twitter,
A portion of her audience has been disinvited to consume her art, because they're "bad people" on her view. This is merely an example of what I am talking about. The question is whether the disinvited hearer or viewer has a moral responsibility to comply.
Tell me you only have generic meme-level responses without telling me you only have hackey-formulaic responses.

I don't really judge art by the personality ot the artists. It's a silly thing to do in my eyes...especially when you consider the founder of cinema is Thomas Edison who was by all accounts a monster. Would you not use a lightbulb because Thomas Edison likely murdered his wife.

Our question here is a bit different. It is not whether or not we would consume (or consume differently) because we judged the artist, but rather whether we would not consume (or consume differently) because the artist had judged us.