A government that rarely bans artists banned one last week. The British Home Office blocked Kanye West from entering the United Kingdom, ruling that his presence would not be conducive to the public good. The Wireless Festival in London, which had booked him as headliner for three nights in July, was cancelled entirely. Sponsors fled. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said West should never have been invited in the first place. What the decision settled is less interesting than what it exposed: not whether you can love an artist’s work while rejecting his ideology, but whether the conditions that once made that position livable still exist.

Kanye West has thirty million followers. In 2022, before any song had been written on the subject, he posted that he was going “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” The post reached tens of millions of people within hours. No record label, no editor, no institution stood between the statement and its audience. This is not a detail about one man’s behavior. It is a description of a new kind of power, one that did not exist a generation ago, and for which we have not yet developed adequate moral categories. The scale of harm is not equivalent to the scale of moral responsibility: an artist with a hundred followers who spreads hatred is equally wrong. But the damage is not equal. And a difference in damage of this magnitude demands a different order of attention.

Richard Wagner is the figure this debate always returns to, and for good reason.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)