At least one organization has called for the boycott of Roman Polanski’s films to protest the director’s guilt in a decades-old rape case.  Polanski, who fled the USA 31 years ago after having been found guilty of having sex with a minor, is awaiting extradition in a Swiss jail.

Calling for justice is one thing, asking to equate someone’s art with his or her moral life is another. That’s a dangerous path to walk. Start out boycotting Chinatown and The Pianist and you just might end up turning your back on many other works of art — that is, if you’re at all consistent. Following the sense of this boycott, here are some local applications:

1) Don’t go to Arizona Opera’s Salome. Its German composer, Richard Strauss, accepted the position of Director of State Music from Joseph Goebbels in 1933. While Strauss never openly embraced Naziism, he was content to live his life and ignore the genocide around him, while allowing the Third Reich to shower him with praise. Not exactly a moral stance.

2)  Write to your favorite local choir and request that it never, ever, sing the music of Gesualdo, Prince of Venice. The great Renaissance choral composer murdered his wife and child when he found out the child wasn’t his.

3)  Avoid anything choreographed by Jerome Robbins – that includes West Side Story – as Robbins’ testimony before the House Un-American Activities in 1951 resulted in the destruction of many lives tainted by “Communist” sympathies.

Disclaimer for those who don’t catch my drift: Of course I don’t mean any of this literally. Great art and high morals are not necessarily to be found in the same person. That was the point of Amadeus, in which the composer Salieri  was appalled by the talent bestowed by God upon toilet-talking Mozart. And  while Polanski’s heinous act was far more serious, the point is the same: Don’t mix up ethics with aesthetics, justice with art.