Where's George Orwell when you need him?

Daniel Mitsui's always fascinating blog, Lion and Cardinal has a long quote from Orwell's "Benefit of Clergy"
Herewith, a reprint of the entire post:
Of course, in this long book of 400 quarto pages there is more than I have indicated, but I do not think that I have given an unfair account of his moral atmosphere and mental scenery. It is a book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would - a thought that might please Dali, who before wooing his future wife for the first time rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat's dung boiled up in fish glue. But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.
The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even - since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard - on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it. ...
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of BENEFIT OF CLERGY. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word Art, and everything is okay: kicking little girls in the head is okay; even a film like L'Age d'Or is okay. It is also okay that Dali should batten on France for years and then scuttle off like a rat as soon as France is in danger. So long as you can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven you.
One can see how false this is if one extends it to cover ordinary crime. In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another KING LEAR. And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman. Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being. ...
I knew I was a genius, somebody once said to me, long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about. And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real MÉTIER to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: INTO WICKEDNESS. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his spectacles - or, at any rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! It is much less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dali's autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would have done in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties, when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed with aristocrats and RENTIERS who had given up sport and politics and taken to patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back. A phobia for grasshoppers - which a few decades back would merely have provoked a snigger - was now an interesting complex which could be profitably exploited. And when that particular world collapsed before the German Army, America was waiting. You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable SALONS of Paris to Abraham's bosom.
That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali's history. But why his aberrations should be the particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to sell such horrors as rotting corpses to a sophisticated public - those are questions for the psychologist and the sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism. They are bourgeois decadence, and that is that. But though this probably states a fact, it does not establish a connection. One would still like to know WHY Dali's leaning was towards necrophilia - and not, say, homosexuality, and WHY the RENTIERS and the aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love like their grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get one any further. But neither ought one to pretend, in the name of detachment, that such pictures as Mannequin Rotting in a Taxicab are morally neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to start out from that fact.
Now, I am not willing to endorse Orwell's (and I imagine, Mr. Mitsui's) opinion of Dali, without knowing more of Dali's work.
But the principle's he elucidates seem inarguable.
Where are the critics who should have said the same of film auteur T's cinematic abattoirs, or photographer M's images of beautiful men with objects inserted into bodily orifices.
Who cares what skill is brought to bear on that which is basically diseased and disgusting?
(Now that I think of it, the Eldest Sister, when I opined once that a dreadful bit of Manilo-esque "liturgical music" was at least well played, swept majestically out of church saying, you don't get points for doing a good job on crap.
She and Orwell, eh?)