Daisy Dixon (Cardiff University): ‘On immoral artists’

An artist’s immorality often affects how we appreciate and interpret their art. My talk will do two things. First, I’ll show that ‘virtue-based’ approaches (Nannicelli 2020) and ‘empiricist’ approaches (Gaut 2007) to the relevance of the artist’s immorality cannot accommodate less easy cases like Hitler’s landscapes – and that they should. Second, after amending the virtue-based account to accommodate these cases, I then show that this improved version still cannot deal with hard cases like Rolf Harris’s paintings – but that it shouldn’t.

Daisy Dixon is a philosopher of art and an artist. She is a lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her research falls at the intersection of philosophy of art, philosophy of language, and political philosophy, and has been published in top-tier academic journals. In her work, she explores how visual art behaves like speech, and how curators can affect what an artwork communicates to its audience. Her current academic project concerns aesthetic injustice and unjust aesthetics: deception in art, artistic hate speech, and protest art. Her teaching interests span aesthetics, philosophy of language, ethics, feminist philosophy, and political philosophy.

This event will take place in person on LSE’s campus. However, those unable to attend in person will have the option of taking part online.

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