I remember vividly the story of R. Kelly and that tape. I’ve never been a fan of R. Kelly’s (before or after), but I’ve always considered his return to mainstream culture-among both critics and fans-a bit of a mystery. Somehow, R. Kelly went from being a predator of girls to being acquitted from all charges in court. From being the guy who video-taped himself having sex with and urinating in the mouth of an 8th grade girl, to headlining the Pitchfork Music Festival. The transformation is remarkable.

But, like I said, the life of R. Kelly in the past 10 years has been of little interest to me as a music fan or culture writer. Perhaps this transformation, for those who’ve followed Kelly, makes sense. Perhaps his new album, Black Panties, which according to Pitchfork is “almost exclusively about pussy,” is wonderful. I don’t know. What I know about R. Kelly is the coverage.

The man behind much of the coverage on the R. Kelly story was then Sun-Times report Jim DeRogatis-who you might know from Sound Opinions. Today, the Village Voice published an interview with DeRogatis by Jessica Hopper, about the R. Kelly affair more than a decade later, the full range of allegations that R. Kelly faced, DeRogatis’ commitment to the story, the lack of interest from other music journalists, and his public indictment of Pitchfork and R. Kelly’s fans for endorsing “a monster.”

I wanted to highlight one exchange that is particularly relevant to The Stake:

You and I got into it over Twitter around Pitchfork, in part over the fact that you were saying, “If you are enjoying R. Kelly, you are effectively cosigning what this man has done.” At the time, I was being defensive, saying people can like what they like.

To be clear, I think Pitchfork was cosigning it. I think each and every one of us, as individual listeners and consumers of culture, has to come up with our own answer. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer. The thing that’s interesting to me is that Pitchfork is a journalistic and critical organ. They do journalism and they do criticism. And then when they are making money to present an act — that’s a cosign, that’s an endorsement. That’s not just writing about and covering it. They very much wanted R. Kelly as their cornerstone artist for the festival. I think it’s fair game to say: “Why, Pitchfork?”

The interview is quite fascinating and you should read it.

While the legal and judicial matters are out of the realm of our project, the moral and cultural heart of this story is central to what we do here at The Stake. It comes down to essentially this: How do you consume culture with a conscience? What does it mean to a fan? What is the appropriate relationship be between the fan, the art, and the personal life of the artist?

We’ve explored this issue before, most notably with Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card, and Card’s homophobic politics. Every debate over art and the artist is unique, and conflating O.S. Card and R. Kelly is not particularly helpful. And as DeRogatis admits in his interview, holding the fan accountable for the actions of the artist is a very risky road to take, because most of us are fans of artists who have done terrible things.

(One way DeRogatis deals with this is by disassociating the art from the reprehensible artistic behavior: i.e, R. Kelly is a sexual predator whose art is about sexual predation; as opposed to say Led Zeppelin, who were completely disgusting, but they did not write songs about violating a woman with a shark, or any of the other horrifying activities the band engaged in).

The point is, though: we all know who R. Kelly is, we know that dozens of underage girls sued him for his predatory and abusive sexual behavior and all the cases were settled. We know he married Aaliyah when she was 15. We know he picked up a woman on her prom night and later paid for her abortion. We know that there were numerous tapes out there of Kelly with young girls, one of which brought him to court, and that he was acquitted for charges of child-pornography (he was never tried for rape).

We make a choice knowing what we know, and that’s the important part. Ignorance isn’t an excuse.

What it means to support “a monster” is something that consumers of culture need to consider, be it R. Kelly or Roman Polanski or whomever, because there are no shortage of reprehensible humans out there, and for better or worse, many of them create beautiful things that we enjoy.

Still, I think it’s true to some extent, as DeRogatis says: we cosign by consuming.

I’ve written in the past about the artwork of “monsters”, about the ethics of art and artists, and I remain convinced that we must judge artwork separately from the individual that creates it. R. Kelly’s music may very well be brilliant. I think Roman Polanski’s is, too.

To me, those choices are easier to make. But the harder questions are not about the monsters. The monsters are easier to wrap our minds around, easier to justify in some sense-there are usually events and individual occurrences to guide us through one person’s actions. The everyday injustices of our popular culture present much more difficult ethical questions around the problem of cosigning by consuming.

A lack of popular representation for women and minorities in network television remains a very real problem, one that’s more indicative of our society’s troubled relationship with pop culture and media than R. Kelly. But R. Kelly’s sexual behavior is a far simpler topic for discussion. (This is not meant to lessen the impact of Kelly’s actions on the young girls Kelly preyed on. There is no defense for sexual abuse). Many of our cultural injustices are broad, systemic, issues that can’t be assigned to a single perpetrator. They are much more difficult to elaborate, but equally morally problematic.

Our popular culture is a reflection of the moral life of the society that consumes it. We may recoil at that thought, but it’s true. Representation of ourselves, to ourselves, matters in culture. Art and culture have actual impacts on those who consume it.

I write a lot about these issues, and I think the cosign metaphor is as apt as any I’ve seen for how to navigate this discussion. Half of the world remains vastly underrepresented in the stories of our popular culture. If our boys do not have access to stories that treat women as equal members of society, they will not have a fully-actualized notion of the equal value of women in society. That does not mean you cannot enjoy superhero movies that have little interest in female characters. But if we do not provide the stories to make up that gap, to help our boys grow into men of dignity, then we are responsible for their failures, too. We’ve cosigned.

Which all comes back to a simple dictum that makes many roll their eyes but cannot be ignored: our pop culture matters. What you choose to engage means something, even if we don’t know what; the choices we make in culture mean something. And we always make choices when we consume . We are always answering questions when we interact with our popular culture. We are always, to some degree, cosigning.

When we choose what movie to see, what book to read, whether to attend Pitchfork Music Festival, we answer questions about culture. What stories are worth hearing? Whose work are we supporting? Where are we spending our money?

Hopefully, if only to ourselves, the more important question is also being answered: why?