The Fairness Doctrine

"Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" by Lucien Freud

It is admirable when you can admit the brilliance of a locution uttered by someone you hate who also happens to hold you in low esteem. This is one of the highest callings of the human spirit. Say, for instance, you hated Polonius but admitted “neither a borrower nor a lender be” is a cool way of saying it. It’s liberating to be able to appreciate people not for who they are but for what they do, what they produce or what comes out of their mouth. Patricia Highsmith was not a very likeable tortured person nor probably was Sylvia Plath or her one-time husband Ted Hughes, but they were all enormously talented. You wouldn’t have wanted to come into V.S. Naipaul’s path, especially if you were a woman or for that matter John Cheever, until he stopped drinking and wrote Falconer. Life isn’t fair and great trust and earnestness does not always produce beauty despite what Keats averred. Lucien Freud was a rat by all accounts, but it takes a Rat Man to produce the rolls of exquisite fat on models like Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley. Some people find this tantamount to exploiting the bearded woman at the carnival, but in the hands of a brilliant sociopath, the equation "beauty doesn’t necessarily lead to truth begins to make sense." It is a like the search for a unified theory. Is it a matter of poetic justice or science? 

read "White Meat, Breasts" by Francis Levy, Evergreen Review

and watch the animation of Erotomania