It makes you not watch some potentially great films, thus creating a hole in your film knowledge. It also conditions you to keep looking for flaws in filmmakers instead of in their art, completely missing the point. Finally, it gives you an 'easy' way out of the dilemma, probably not even tackling it. Instead of wrestling with it and recognizing the obvious divide, you just cop out of it thus perpetuating your bias. This further conditions you to want from the world exactly what YOU want in the exact way YOU want: "Either you're a good human being, or I'll boycott anything you create, regardless of its quality!".
You become holier-than-thou and treat artists like role models, whom they're not supposed to be. The question is: where's your line? I bet you're not comfy with murderers (Caravaggio is out) and rapists (Roman Polański is out). What about adulterers (is Hong Sang-soo out?) and propagandists (is Joris Ivens out?)? What about films you disagree with politically and morally? And so on. You might have a cut-off point somewhere, but I'm not sure if you can give a defensible reason for why it's there and not somewhere else.
This isn't a contest in purity. Not everything in your appreciation of art has to be noble. In this specific case, you're just asked to separate art from the artist. Even hardcore proponents of the auteur theory understand that there's a difference between the two plus that there's a difference between the artist person and the person person.
It's closer than you may think, though it's more salient when discussing artists who willingly put the bad stuff in their films and thus actually or seemingly champion it.
You become holier-than-thou and treat artists like role models, whom they're not supposed to be. The question is: where's your line? I bet you're not comfy with murderers (Caravaggio is out) and rapists (Roman Polański is out). What about adulterers (is Hong Sang-soo out?) and propagandists (is Joris Ivens out?)? What about films you disagree with politically and morally? And so on. You might have a cut-off point somewhere, but I'm not sure if you can give a defensible reason for why it's there and not somewhere else.
This isn't a contest in purity. Not everything in your appreciation of art has to be noble. In this specific case, you're just asked to separate art from the artist. Even hardcore proponents of the auteur theory understand that there's a difference between the two plus that there's a difference between the artist person and the person person.
It's closer than you may think, though it's more salient when discussing artists who willingly put the bad stuff in their films and thus actually or seemingly champion it.