<em>Tár</em> Has an Answer to Art’s Toughest Question

This story contains major spoilers for Tár.

As someone who writes about art and artists for a living, I confess that I find no question more exhausting than “Can we separate the art from the artist?” The only good answer is a frustrating one: “It depends.” So I went into Tár, Todd Field’s acclaimed movie starring Cate Blanchett, with some dread. The film, which follows a fictional famed classical-music conductor who’s subjected to public shaming, has been hyped as asking difficult questions and celebrating ambiguity. The premise seems designed to win Oscar campaigns and ruin dinner parties, restarting old arguments without resolving them.

Yet ’s mostly riveting two-and-a-half-hour saga turned out to be oddly clarifying. The film does tell its story in an elliptical, at times confounding way, but that stylistic choice shouldn’t be mistaken for moral indecision. Field ends up making a fierce case that creator and creation usually can’t