The 1949 film The Third Man casts Orson Welles in the role of smirking Harry Lime, a black-market racketeer who sees himself as an artist. War-torn Vienna is his canvas; its desperate people his oils. He needs a climate of fear and darkness in order to paint his masterpiece. “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” Lime explains. “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The Third Man was scripted by Graham Greene, but its most famous speech was improvised on the spot. Welles would later say he’d pilfered it from “an old Hungarian play” the name of which he’d forgotten, but there are more philosophical echoes here, too. He might have been referencing Walter Benjamin, who argued that “at the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism”, or Friedrich Nietzsche, who felt that “the strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity”. True artists, in other words, are ruthless and amoral. They make their own rules and leave casualties in their wake. But what would you rather have in your life? The soaring genius of the Italian Renaissance or the bland precision of the cuckoo clock?

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I used to think I knew the answer: Italian Renaissance, without a doubt. But these are difficult times for tyrannical artists and the idiots who support them. The lid has been lifted, the list of sexual harassments grows ever longer and there’s only so much you can read about the supposed misdeeds of Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman before one starts to feel complicit. There have also been denials from James Toback, Louis CK and Lars von Trier. These are men whose work I admire. Some (Polanski, Von Trier) have produced art that I love. If they come up dirty, that means that I’m soiled, too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hubristic monster … Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). ‘If modern day Hollywood has a Lime figure, it is surely Harvey Weinstein.’ Photograph: www.ronaldgrantarchive.com

Except that this is the dilemma that runs through the whole of art history. Either everything’s dirty or everything’s clean. Caravaggio was a murderer but his paintings are sublime. David Bowie slept with underage girls. Ezra Pound and TS Eliot were both antisemites. Does admiring their poems make us condoners of hate-speech? Or do we cut this Gordian knot and view the work in isolation?

That’s the position advised by psychology professor Peggy Drexler. “It’s critical to remember that when we watch a film, view art or read a book, we’re doing so to be entertained and enriched,” she says. “We’re not doing it to issue an endorsement of the human being whose work it is.”

Drexler acknowledges that our attitude to the artist can impact on our attitude to their art. Still, she insists that a line must be maintained. “Art and morality are distinct activities. And it’s essential to separate the art from the artist. Chances are good that if we delved into the private lives of every single artist whose work we admired, surely we’d find plenty not to like, and even to be disgusted by.” She jokes that we’d never watch another film again in our lives.

I’d love to follow Drexler’s advice. Keep the art clean and pure, exempt from the actions of its creator. I’m just not convinced it quite works in practice. If we accept that “bad” (subjective moral judgment) people can create “good” (subjective aesthetic judgment) art, then it follows that amoral artists can hold the world to a higher moral standard than they follow themselves. But isn’t art also an extension of the artist’s inner self? How does one begin separating the two? “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” as Yeats put it – though ought we still to quote Yeats, what with all that fascist-sympathising? If so, here’s another: “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”

Away in Los Angeles, film historian Cari Beauchamp suggests a more nuanced approach. She cites the example of DW Griffith’s 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation, a fantastically racist celebration of what it calls “the great KKK” which nonetheless established the rules of film grammar and stands as a piece of living history. “The bottom line is that you can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Beauchamp insists. “You can’t erase history by not showing The Birth of a Nation. It’s a powerful film. It should stay part of the conversation. But what you can do is show it in context. You show it with a discussion. You say: ‘That was then and this is now’ – and you learn from it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘If the director comes up dirty, so do we’ … Jack Nicholson in director Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Photograph: Allstar/PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Beauchamp’s suggestion makes sense. Show the text, warts and all. Keep the ongoing quarrel in the public domain. But even here, perhaps, there are potential hazards. Yes, the context questions the art. But does it also add to its mystique? Maybe even enhance it? Assuming that happens, we’ve crossed to the dark side. We’re back to the bloodshed and the Borgias and the Italian Renaissance.

Take Last Tango in Paris, in which director Bernardo Bertolucci hid the details of a graphic rape scene from Maria Schneider, “because he wanted her to feel, not act, the rage and humiliation”. Or Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, a barely sublimated piece of sexual harassment against its star, Tippi Hedren. Both films are not without merit. Marnie may be a masterpiece. But is it a masterpiece in spite or because of its poisonous backstory? Some might even claim that’s what makes the film so intense.

The writer and film-maker Mark Cousins rejects this notion. Classic motion pictures, he feels, can be retro-actively tarnished. Cousins says he can no longer defend in the way he once did. He thinks Polanski’s work may now be compromised, too. Unbridled genius is no excuse. “Artists have the same social and moral responsibilities as bus drivers and bankers,” Cousins says. “If they’re dicks, they’re dicks. And it doesn’t matter if they made Marnie.”

At the root of all this is a question of personal responsibility. That applies to the executives at Netflix, now hastily severing their ties with House of Cards star Spacey, or the Hollywood suits currently agonising over what to do with the upcoming Weinstein Company releases. No doubt it’s an issue for actors such as Kate Winslet and Kristen Stewart who continue to work with Woody Allen in the light of a historical child-abuse allegation, although he has always denied it. But perhaps it also extends to us, the consumer. In supporting the art, we are – indirectly – supporting the person who made it, too.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘If film-makers are dicks, they’re dicks. And it doesn’t matter if they made Marnie’ … Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1964 thriller. Photograph: Allstar/Universal

Mortifyingly, I suspect I’m more guilty than most. For years I thrilled to the notion of the wild, outlaw artist. I thought of great, personal film-making as something torn from the heart, or a form of self-therapy. It was the process by which flawed, stumbling individuals could harness their demons and spin their basest matter into gold. That sounds wonderfully romantic. It may also be bullshit. Because what if it’s not that at all? How about, instead of harnessing the demons, the artistic process is a means of feeding the demons, of indulging them? Then the film is a fig leaf; even a by-product of abuse.

Cousins tells the tale of a volunteer he once met at a refugee camp. The man had been doing charity work for decades. When Cousins asked why, the volunteer explained that he’d been a bully at school and that the work was atonement. “Everybody is flawed and most people have demons,” Cousins says. “The danger with the creative world, with a director like James Toback, is that the demon, the aggression, is often amplified. Firstly, because of the power and the cult of personality. Secondly, because so many people, especially critics, value ‘dark’ themes. Toback’s theme,” he adds, “should have been shame.”

In 1997, Cari Beauchamp wrote a book called Without Lying Down, a celebration of the women who helped make Hollywood. This showed that, back in the 1920s and 30s, the US film industry was more open and equal. But when it began to make money, the men took the top jobs. Hollywood narrowed, socially and morally. “It became a transit lounge where abuse happened,” Cousins explains. “It was a stag fantasy, a Lord of the Flies. ‘What happens in Hollywood stays in Hollywood’ could have been the legend.” Which brings us up to the present day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lars von Trier with Nicole Kidman, who starred in his 2003 film Dogville – ‘a powerful, insightful – and yes, even moral – work of art’. Photograph: Nick Wall/WireImage

If modern day Hollywood has a Harry Lime figure, it is surely Harvey Weinstein, another hubristic monster who played by his own rules. Weinstein, sources say, would typically explain his volcanic temper and voracious appetites as being all part and parcel of his “passion for movies”. This implied that the ends always justified the means – even if the means were compulsive sexual harassment, and allegedly worse; even if the end was a film like Madonna’s W.E. Ultimately, he was no more a great artist than smirking Lime. And yet Weinstein’s fall has cast the whole industry in an ugly light. It’s like directing a UVA lamp at a crime scene. That gleaming interior is thick with thumbprints, blood and semen.

Weinstein’s disgrace is still rolling news. It remains to be seen where more evidence is uncovered and which other film-makers get caught in the net. Beauchamp hopes that the repercussions will prompt a wider societal shift. Failing that, it may result in a few repeat offenders being abruptly scared straight.

“Fear is the operative emotion in this town,” she says. “And the priority is always the next quarter’s bottom line. Right now, after Weinstein, everybody’s floundering, looking over their shoulder. If it’s because of fear that some people will stop intimidating other people, then that’s good, I’ll accept it. At least it means that they’re stopping.”

So what should we choose – cuckoo clock or Renaissance? Alternatively we could agree that the distinction is false. Our relationship with art is not a political stance, or lifetime membership of one particular club. It’s more fluid, more thorny. Our judgment shifts back and forth and requires constant renegotiation – just as our relationship with the artist needs to be closely monitored, too. If a film strikes us differently every time that we see it, it follows that some of these encounters will be more awkward than others. Sometimes they might be better avoided altogether.

In a chest of drawers are a stack of old DVDs. There’s Polanski’s Chinatown, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, Hitchcock’s Marnie. These remain some of my favourite films. Each is a powerful, insightful – and yes, even moral – work of art. I don’t think they’re compromised; I think they might be exempt. It’s just that this week, temporarily, I’m in no rush to rewatch them. Renaissance Italy seems less appealing and the old assumptions are toast. All at once, Switzerland seems a good place to make camp.