Is it OK to still enjoy the works of problematic artists? Should we boycott them? Should we cancel them? And what the hell does 'canceling' mean, anyway? Erich Matthes' Drawing the Line is a wonderfully accessible, entertaining, and deep response to these questions. It is the opposite of a hot take. Where the cultural discourse tends to hand-wave and mush together a hundred different issues, Matthes offers us nuance and care. Drawing the Line shows how many really distinctive issues are in play. It disentangles them for us, and shows how incredibly different and complicated the answers can get. And it actually does real work to help us figure out how to navigate our way through the mess.
Erich Hatala Matthes is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Director of the Frost Center for the Environment at Wellesley College. His teaching and research focus on the ethics, politics, and aesthetics of art, cultural heritage, and the environment. He majored in English and Philosophy at Yale and earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in Ethics, Philosophical Studies, Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Public Affairs Quarterly, Social Theory and Practice, Ergo, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Analysis, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Philosophy Compass, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and various edited collections. He has also written award-winning popular pieces for Aeon and Apollo Magazine.