Why are the cultural elite honouring this paedophile?
When is a paedophile not a paedophile? When he has both artistic merit and influential friends. How else can the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art justify displaying the work of this self-confessed pederast, asks Lucy Carne.
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When is a paedophile not a paedophile?
When he has both artistic merit and influential friends.
At least, that’s what we learnt from Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art last week.
The Brisbane gallery has decided to include two drawings by known paedophile Donald Friend in the highly-publicised exhibition celebrating legendary artist Margaret Olley, that opened last week and runs until October 13.
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Friend, who died in 1989, was close to Olley and the two at times inspired each other’s work.
This somehow seems to make it acceptable to honour a self-confessed pederast in the Margaret Olley: A Generous Life exhibition.
That is because GOMA — in what it calls a calls a “contemporary retelling of history” — acknowledges that Friend preyed on young boys.
The acknowledgment is a small note on the wall beside Friend’s drawings (hung towards the end of the exhibition), that describes how Friend wrote in his diaries about his “inappropriate relationships with underage boys when living in Bali from 1967-80”.
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Friend’s pieces on display at GOMA are sketches of Olley and not his drawings of naked Balinese boys, with their attention to juvenile phallic detail.
Friend was never charged or tried in court, but he provided evidence in his diaries that he was a serial paedophile.
In a passage written in the 1960s, he wrote about spending the night with a 10-year-old boy he regularly had sex with, saying: “I hope life will continue forever to offer me delicious surprises.”
Friend, then 53, continues about his underage victim: “He goes about the act of love with a charmingly self-possessed grace: gaily, affectionately, and enthusiastically. And in these matters he’s very inventive and not at all sentimental for all the caresses.”
This was a 10-year-old boy.
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Where is the disgust and condemnation that this creep’s art decorates the walls of Australia’s largest gallery.
Of course, this ‘personality quirk’, also known as the criminal act of paedophilia, is glossed over by Australia’s cultural elite.
Arts author and consultant James Murdoch, in the documentary A Loving Friend, says of Friend’s underage victims “... the reality is that they seduced him”.
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The Diaries of Donald Friend editor Paul Hetherington adds: “... I don’t think that Friend behaved in ways which would attract much criticism from people today and which at the time didn’t attract particular criticism either.”
Why are we pretending sex with children is not a crime? Why is the arts community not outraged?
It’s simple: Friend is protected by the absolving filter that is creative talent.
He has fallen on the right side of the sliding scale of acceptable paedophilia in the arts world.
Why is it that Rolf Harris is a grub and we should toss out his LPs, but it’s perfectly acceptable to proudly hang a Donald Friend sketch of a young naked boy?
We see this apoplectic hypocrisy play out in Hollywood.
Roman Polanski fled the US to escape jail time for raping, drugging and sodomising a 13-year-old girl.
Yet he is still fawned over, including by Meryl Streep who gave him a standing ovation at the 2003 Academy Awards.
“I know it wasn’t rape-rape,” Whoopi Goldberg said in the filmmaker’s defence.
So how can an esteemed, taxpayer-funded ($4 million over two years from the Palaszczuk Government) institution rationalise the embrace of a man who abused children?
How can they justify this shameful disgrace?
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Queensland Art Gallery director Chris Saines told The Australian newspaper that they were “simply stating facts” by noting Friend’s past.
“We feel that because the world has a very different perspective on serious misconduct on the part of artists in the course of their lives, this is something that in the 21st century is part of the bigger story that museums need from time to time to tell,” Saines said.
But by choosing to include Friend, GOMA has set a standard of practice of myopic sycophancy.
Yes, there is an expectation that artists are dangerous and some do have criminal and unstable pasts.
Caravaggio murdered a rival, Nigel Milson did time in jail for armed robbery, Nolde was a Nazi, Picasso treated women appallingly.
But when British artist Graham Ovenden was found guilty in 2013 of six charges of indecency with a child and imprisoned, the Tate Gallery pulled his works from their walls and website.
When an artist, who admits to having sex with children sketches naked boys, his art is an extension of his crime. It is tainted by his evil.
Donald Friend is someone who should have been jailed.
By hanging his work in a gallery and legitimising him as an artist, we are colluding in his obscenity.
Lucy Carne is editor of RendezView.com.au
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