Creators of beauty are capable of ugliness

This article was published in The Age 11 January 2010

Creating beauty does not make you immune to committing ugly acts, just ask filmmaker Roman Polanski.

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''.