Image by Peter Doig
"On a conscious level, she wasn't sure what the painting meant or even where it had come from, she knew only that it was a work of complicated and unexpected beauty and that she was somehow responsible for it. Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, "beauty" smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence of double wide motor homes, mahpgci marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as pverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge."
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