Can you separate the art from the artist? ‘MJ’ puts it to the test

Eliot called April the cruelest month, but the calendar appears to have democratized the badness. The question of whether it’s possible to separate the artist from the art has been on my mind since I saw “MJ,” the jukebox musical about Michael Jackson that treats its subject with sequin gloves. I’m sure these online acquaintances also saw the HBO doc “Leaving Neverland,” which examines the singer’s involvement with two boys who claim to have been sexually abused by Jackson. The toxic plastic has been used by other artists, but what distinguishes Beasley, in Knight’s words, is the way he “wields resin like an embalming material — an industrial-strength amber for trapping life’s transient flies.” Kevin Beasley embeds raw Virginia cotton into clear resin for paintings and sculptures like “the last bath.” In walking around her lush, green neighborhood, Gelt notices “a striking disconnect between the perils of climate change and Angelenos’ behavior in the face of it.” In a timely, thought-provoking essay, she examines how Hollywood helped make a green lawn “fundamental to the foundation of the California dream.” Let’s go fly a kite: Times staff writer Deborah Vankin has a preview of Community and Unity People’s Kite Festival, which launches “a veritable art gallery in the sky with kites of all varieties — enormous diving dragons, swooshing centipedes and tiny diamonds in an explosion of color.” But it’s not all recreational frivolity. The story of how a “granny flat” or ADU in South Pasadena brought a family closer together is vividly captured in Times staff writer Lisa Boone’s report, which has the coziest set of sun-dappled photos.