It is, hands-down, my favorite Onion headline of 2018: “Aspiring Actor Dreams Of One Day Publicly Voicing Regret For Working With Woody Allen.”

AO Scott, the New York Times film critic, voiced his own regret last week, joining Greta Gerwig, Colin Firth and a host of others. His contribution is notable because what is a film critic, if not the consumer who is first among equals? We all get to watch the movie and say what we want about it, but Scott gets to do so in the New York Times.

In “My Woody Allen Problem,” Scott muses over the outsized – and troubling – role Allen played shaping his own sensibilities. As Scott puts it, “Reassessment is part of the ordinary work of culture, and in an extraordinary time, the work is especially vital and especially challenging.”

Reassessment? It staggers the imagination: do we need to reassess 17-year-old Mariel Hemingway as a plausible love interest for a 44-year-old Woody Allen in Manhattan? Scott writes, “There is a powerful and understandable urge … to expunge the perpetrators, to turn away from their work and scrub it from the canon.”

While Scott goes on to say it’s never that easy, I believe we are reassessing the wrong thing. Scott, the critic, has taken it upon himself to examine his complicity in Allen’s enduring popularity; we, the audience, need to do the same.

Biography shouldn’t serve as a convenient excuse to let ourselves off the hook. It seems the more loudly we denounce a biography, the easier it is to drown out the voice in our heads that dares to ask, “So, why did you love his movies?”

I was raised by a Jew who loved Wagner. As such, my father never papered over the fact that Wagner was a rotten bigot. The larger lesson was this: sometimes terrible people make great art.

John Lennon wrote Imagine. He also beat women. Bernini made marble come to life. He also had his muse’s actual face slashed with a razor. However, Woody Allen is inconveniently alive. What’s more, he has tackled some of the crimes he stands accused of committing in his most famous movies.

If Woody Allen the man is too much intertwined with his art, it’s his own damn fault: he’s an auteur after all. That means Allen’s poor treatment of women didn’t just play out in a tabloid break-up, but also in dozens of movies many of us adored, paid to see, and that the Library of Congress deemed “culturally significant” and added to National Film Registry.

We cannot simply cross these movies off that list and wash our hands of the matter. We shouldn’t sit around saying, “Gee, wasn’t New York cool in the 70s,” and forget about that era’s sexism and sexualization of children. We lose a critical piece of our cultural knowledge – and our ability to recognize who we were so we can actually change – when we expurgate anything tricky or objectionable from the record.

The Time’s Up movement and the #MeToo moment need to reckon with what kinds of movies get funding going forward and move the needle toward progress for women. Also, to be sure, Allen is past his prime. However, his contributions are admired and are in the canon. And, I think, they ought to stay there for the same reason I don’t think the Met should trash all its Balthus: culture is messy because it reflects a messy world.

My hope going forward is that we can both allow ourselves to be moved by art while being forthright about where it came from. I’m all for being straightforward about biographical ugliness, but censoring museum collections or film catalogues in hindsight can erode our cultural heritage to a delusional extent.

I’m not the kind of person who thinks that we can ever understand how the Holocaust happened if we focus on how evil the Nazis were in one part of our minds and how amazing Beethoven and Hegel were in another. They all sprang from one very complex culture.

We can have higher standards for men specifically and society in general while not telling ourselves all artists have to be good for their art to be useful or resonant. It’s far more important to ask why something can move us when such a terrible person created it – rather than just scrapping the whole thing with a glib hashtag.

We need to ask the harder questions if we are going to be honest with ourselves. The answers will be less flattering, but more worthwhile. Those answers will help us better understand our shared culture – and only then can we improve it and make it more genuinely, not just cosmetically, inclusive.

• Cara Marsh Sheffler is a freelance writer and translator who edits Works & Days, an arts quarterly

Sign up for the Guardian US opinion newsletter