Everyone who likes art inevitably has the experience of revisiting something that they loved many years ago and, with older and more experienced eyes, finding it deeply Problematic. ‘Problematic’ is a strange word, being essentially a shorthand for “has issues which are too abstract to fit conveniently into this sentence without making it unwieldy”, but it’s become rather popular over recent decades specifically because of this vagueness. Problems are commonplace, complex, and interwoven, and though we must eventually get into the guts of what those particular problems and their complexities are it is useful to have a catch-all term to start with.
As time passes, and we gain a greater understanding of the societal issues of the past and how they contribute to current issues, as we find out more potentially troubling background information about the creators, more and more work shifts into problematic territory. We can probably safely assume that everything, sooner or later and to greater or lesser degree, will eventually be problematic. The question that naturally follows when something you love becomes problematic, for whatever reason, is: Do you continue to love it? Can you? Should you?
Can you even completely stop loving something you once loved if you feel you ought to? Once we have a positive experience it sticks in memory, and barring something really traumatic it tends to stay there for life. There’s a part of you that will always have time for this piece of art, no matter how troubling its implications or stereotypical its characters – and this is fine.
More than fine: It’s good.
Just as no piece of art will ever be aesthetically perfect, no piece of art will ever be ideologically perfect, and learning to see, evaluate, and appreciate those imperfections will give you a lens through which to see the ways in which your own beliefs and ideals may be harmful. It will give you a critical eye to see how a piece can be deeply flawed, irresponsible, even dangerous, but still be worthy of your love – the bits and pieces of brilliance that shine through the stupidity and cruelty, sometimes even without the creator really intending them to.
All art is problematic, it’s just a question of whether or not we’ve noticed it and put names to those problems yet. More than though, all art should be problematic – the only way it could ever be anything less is by staying purely within well understood boundaries of fact and portraying only perfectly kind and healthy people and relationships – in other words, only if it had nothing to say and nothing to offer. Even then, it would probably fail – frequently it is those works which tried to be most morally upstanding at the time which become most troubling in retrospect.
Yet we desire purity, and this desire manifests in two ways: Many people will reject any and all criticism of something they love out of hand, deny there are any issues so that they can still love uncomplicatedly, and presume a perfection that does not exist just to avoid considering any potential flaws. Others will immediately discard any work, no matter how much they might otherwise value it, the moment there’s any question of it having issues, of it being less than perfect: They will deny the validity of any art that fails to hew to their moral standards. Either art is beyond criticism, or it is hanging on a thread above a pit of cancellation. These two opposing stances have the same root cause: Unwillingness to love imperfection.
The challenges of loving art are much the same as the challenges of loving people: Both are unreliable, both will let you down sometime, there is no perfection and as time moves on it leaves our flawed beliefs and aesthetics behind. It is necessary, though, to learn both to see imperfection and to see past imperfection: To see the harm done by careless stereotypes or hamfisted allegories, but also see the moments of beauty and insight and humanity lying just beyond. This isn’t to say you have to continue to love art that the world has moved past, just that you not feel obligated to hate it – or to ignore its flaws.