Blasphemy, 1989

‘Blasphemy’ has the same number of letters in it as ‘beautiful’ and ‘brilliant.’ It has to do with the puritanical and generally philistine attitude, common in the art world as in the culture at large, that insists that if you’re beautiful you can’t also be brilliant. It’s a function of the need to suppress the threat to seriousness that prettiness and frivolity pose, and that’s why the painting’s called Blasphemy. I’d begun to write about the general topic at this time and some twelve years later it turned into a book.