Should we throw out the good art with the bad artists?

Globe and Mail arts critic Russell Smith, always an interesting and challenging commentator, has produced a particularly brave and provocative piece in today's paper.
In it, he asks whether we should ignore or shun works of arts - be they in the sphere of film, literature, painting or indeed any artistic field of endeavour - just because the creative force behind it was criminal, immoral, offensive, or just plain politically incorrect. It's a perennial thorny problem, but all the more pertinent in recent days with the ongoing revelations of the sexual assaults and inappropriate habits of filmmakers, media personalities and prominent sportsmen. Smith, though, holds nothing back, and comes out swinging.
He begins by asking whether we should blacklist the sublime work of Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini on the grounds that the artist was a double murderer and probably a rapist. What about Caravaggio (also a murderer)? Egon Schiele (abuser of teenage girls), Marquis de Sade (rapist), Ezra Pound (anti-Semite), Martin Heidegger (Nazi sympathiser), etc, etc? Should Adolf Hitler's youthful watercolour paintings be destroyed? What, then, about art by more or less good people on unpalatable subjects, like some of the films of Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, uncomfortable books like Nabokov's Lolita, or the performance art of Zhu Yu, who photographed himself eating what is purportedly a human fetus?
Does it make a difference if the artist gains financially from his or her art? We then get into the realm of filmmakers with checkered pasts like Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, et al. Some of these people will probably never make a film again (although some seem to perennially escape public censure). But should their back catalogue be destroyed as well? Should they effectively be erased from history?
Russell Smith takes the outspoken view that art is completely divorced from the personal life of the artist. Indeed, he goes further to say that he actively seeks out art by bad boys. He argues that we should be curious to see how beauty is perceived by a violent person, and that great art is often about badness, at least in part. He further asserts that, by "consuming" art, we are not necessarily perpetuating the ideas behind it, or validating the beliefs of the individuals who created it. He positively expects that good art be about moral danger, that art should be troubling and uncomfortable, even unpleasant, that it is there to challenge the viewer, not just to be "enjoyed".
This is probably an extreme, purist view of the sanctity of Art-with-a-capital-A, and I'm not even sure that I subscribe to it. But kudos to Smith for having the cojones to publicly espouse it, particularly in the current charged environment.