OF sick-fuck BALTHOS ("Sexualizing the Young") and BONO

I think we can safely say that Balthus was a sick fuck. I'm sure whoever he fucked (he did marry a Japanese woman 35 years younger than himself) he either dressed or groomed her to look like a 13 year-old, or his thoughts had to drift toward images of young girls while he was screwing.

Take a look at this one, which I don't think is on exhibit at the Met!

It's called "The Guitar Lesson."

In the October 7th issue of "The New Yorker," reviewing the Met exhibit, PETER SCHJELDAHL noted:

"For more than six decades, until his death, in 2001, at the age of ninety-two, Balthus depicted young girls in gamy poses, attributing any perceived eroticism to viewers with unclean minds...Was Balthus a pedophile? His interest, if not lust, didn’t stir before his subjects’ pubescence, but it waned in their late teens. The show occurs at a cultural moment that is stretched between sexualizing the young and reacting with horror and anger to the lately abundant cases of their sexual exploitation. If you can shrug off that tension at the Met, I salute your detachment. I sure can’t. Balthus puts me in two minds, attracted and repelled, in search of a third. He strains the moral impunity of high art to an elemental limit..."

However, as I mentioned previously, there is no question that, unlike the self-absorbed fraud Banksy, for example, Balthus IS an artist. A sick fuck, but an artist. Balthus didn't have to be Banksy and stick graffiti on walls, pull pranks, nag the media with idiotic boasts or deliberately and relentlessly push his blatantly obvious publicity stunting in order to get attention. That's because Balthus was an original, and he could paint. Banksy has to rely on gimmicks and hype.

When Balthus died in 2001, not only did the funeral attract the kind of gliteratti that Banksy's snake-like tongue is sniffing for (Elle Macpherson and Cartier-Bresson for example), but actual royalty. Prince Sadruddhin Aga Khan was there, and so was the President of France among others.

Oh yes, and there was music at the event. BONO sang for the mourners. The sick fuck. If BALTHUS had pedophiliac fantasies, BONO's are probably in the area of the necrophile. After all, anyone who likes his music has to be dead from the neck up, so he might concentrate on whatever's left from the neck down.