Was the verge of purchasing a watercolour.

The watercolour is by Donald Friend.

Researching the artist and it looks like he was a paedophile.

Don't think I could have a piece of art on the wall and every time I look at it know kids suffered at the hands of the artist.

Over reaction ... and if not, where is the line drawn.


Creators of beauty are capable of ugliness


Should artistic talent place those who possess it above the law? Put this way, no one would answer in the affirmative, yet many artists and intellectuals argue as if genius exists in a different moral universe.

Two recent cases - those of the filmmaker Roman Polanski and the painter Donald Friend - reveal how the misdeeds of the artist can be whitewashed by those who want to protect the purity of their artistic creations. The cases are especially instructive because the misdeeds involve crimes against children. The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy mounted an impassioned defence of Polanski, now under house-arrest in Switzerland waiting extradition to the US for what Levy dismisses as ''an act of unlawful intercourse with a minor committed 30 years ago''.

According to the 1977 indictment, Polanski lured a 13-year-old to a photoshoot then plied her with alcohol and a sedative before raping and sodomising her. He pleaded guilty to lesser charges then absconded.

Yet for Polanski's defenders, he is the victim in this affair. Evincing no concern for the effects on the girl, Levy expatiates instead on the "humiliation" and "persecution" Polanski has had to suffer, a "nightmare" in which he has been "treated like a terrorist".

The apologetics reflect a curious feature of the human psyche, our penchant for projecting our love of an artistic creation onto the creator. The phenomenon was at work last year when a documentary revealed that esteemed Australian painter Donald Friend was a pedophile. Made by Kerry Negara, the film reported Friend's boast, made in his diaries, of frequent sex with boys as young as nine and 10 while living in Bali.

The arguments deployed by some of Friend's supporters to rationalise his behaviour and explain away his crimes were extraordinary. Pedophilia is not black and white, said one prominent curator, but a "penumbra". Friend's activities were on the light rather than the dark side of sex with children because he was interested in notions of youth and beauty.

The painter's defender said "it was the ideal of the beauty of the body that mattered most to him". In fact, Friend was having sex not with an ideal but with real people - boys, now men, who told Kerry Negara that they felt exploited and damaged and ashamed of what happened to them.

Yet Friend's apologist said he would be "shocked" if anyone described him as a pedophile, a word presumably reserved for men who have sex with children for reasons less noble than those motivating an artist.

To be fair, we all choose to overlook the faults of our idols. Sometimes it is justified. For reasons difficult to explain, I can set aside Wagner's anti-Semitism, Schopenhauer's misogyny and Patrick White's vindictiveness to delight in their works; but I cannot forgive Ezra Pound or Salvador Dali for their prolonged support of fascism.

When we project our love of an artistic work onto the artist, we cannot bear to accept the creator of something beautiful, inspiring or meaningful could not embody those qualities.

We want to believe the qualities we see in the creations must be direct emanations from the soul of the creator, and the more so as the culture becomes higher. Painters, composers and poets seem to be granted the greatest moral latitude. After all, in ways we fear and respect, we imagine them to be tormented by their demons, and it is the insights they derive from wrestling with their souls that gives them the courage to repudiate convention, break society's rules and cross the boundaries at which the rest of us baulk.

If this is so they deserve our toleration because their transgressions are essential to the creativity that delights, discomforts and challenges us. Yet artists, all too human, are prone to interpret society's leniency as a licence to do as they please, the more so as their renown grows.

Not all taboos are there to be broken. Perversion is not subversion (to borrow from Slavoj Zizek) and, painful as it may be, we must allow our heroes to fall when they cross into the forbidden zone. Grey areas it may have, but that zone always includes the sexual abuse of children.

Feeling sad, angry or betrayed, we are forced to admit that the idol who creates things of rare beauty or reveals to us hidden truths is also capable of ugliness and vice.

Clive Hamilton is professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University


http://tinyurl.com/6w6v8sv

I have. I have just canceled the transaction because the piece would have always been tainted and so would any money made from it if I sold it on.

I am just curious of what other people thinking. Am I over reacting since the guy is dead now.

He's never done it before. How bad can it be?

It might even be curative. A new path.

____ wrote on Jun 12^th, 2012 at 10:14pm:



I know you don't think for yourself and are conflicted about everything, even about 'ethical art'.

As for skippy, if you want a cyber BJ from him, all you have to say is 'Danish' and he'll be there, all swivel eyes and eager anticipation. I mentioned the word carelessly once (being of Danish extraction) and he's been pulling at my trouser legs ever since, the dirty little submissive. Now I have written the word twice here, he's bound to be around soon, salivating and smacking his lips.

hi.
if it's beautiful, buy it. when the price doubles in 5 years you won't mind what he did 100 years ago.