The double standard

If you have ever driven a car*

(Henry Ford was a breathtaking anti-semite. He personally funded the translation and distribution of the defamatory Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- which proliferated the myth of an international Jewish conspiracy -- ​in the United States.)

---

If you have ever made a phone call*

(Alexander Graham Bell was a eugenicist who advocated for laws to restrict immigration by certain ethnicities to the US, and who actively discouraged the use of sign language among the American Deaf community.)

---

If you use electricity*

(Thomas Edison electrocuted animals to demonstrate the dangerous power of his rival's alternating currents.)

---

*then you have already mastered the simple practice of benefiting from the work of terrible men without condoning their terrible actions. It is possible to hold that a creation is good and the creator is partly or entirely bad at the same time. These concepts do not contradict one another.
So why
do we denounce
the art of artists
who do bad things?