As artists fall into disgrace, must their art be consigned to oblivion?

The other day while paging through a collection of George Orwell's writing, I was startled by his angry dismissal of fellow writers Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden as "fashionable pansies." I shrugged my shoulders and kept on reading. I had a similar reaction about a year ago when leafing through a collection of early Pauline Kael film criticism I happened upon a negative review of the screen version of Lillian Hellman's "The Children's Hour." Kael complains that "the lesbianism is all in the mind" before making this doozy of a parenthetical quip: "I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy -- that there isn't much they can do." These little homophobic nuggets didn't change my thinking about these great writers, who have too much intelligence and flair to be reduced to their worst statements.