While I'm always able to recognise technical skill in their work, if the artist is a terrible person, I will probably avoid their art to the best of my ability. No art is created in a vaccuum, and the person behind it is linked to the work.
For example - Dave Sim's Cerberus is often lauded as an important work of comics history, and I've been encouraged to read it multiple times. I've never been able to get into it, though - and that's not because it's 6000 pages long. It's because Dave Sim has expressed some seriously unsettling and hostile views on women in his writing - he believes, among other things, that women are "without a glimmer of understanding of intellectual processes" - and has a documented history of being distinctly unpleasant and nasty to women in person. I don't want anything to do with the works of a man who thinks my very presence in the world as an independent woman is ruining Western society.
I read a lot of old books - as in, pre-1950 - and with those, it is important to consider context; a lot of them were written before women had the right to vote. A lot of them were written in a time when slavery was if not still legal, then at least still in living memory. It doesn't forgive racism and sexism in books, but it contextualises them, and you can see why they're written the way they are. It's no surprise to find sexist statements in a story written in 1875, and no surprise to find racist slurs in a story from 1910. It's distinctly unpleasant, but not surprising, and you have to see it for what it is; a work written in a time long before any equality movements had had time to happen.
To find someone describing women as anti-intelectual voids today, though? Yeah, no.
And that's just one specific case; there are plenty of others. And yes, I know we're all human beings who make mistakes and nobody is perfect, but I'm also free to choose whose art I engage with, and whose art I avoid. Being a horrible person is a good way to end up in the avoid-category.
