Yes, well put --- all of it. A further reason that paintings such as Freud's are widely accepted as okay within the Modern Art establishment is that he is not allowing what skill he does possess, to lower itself to the service of the merely beautiful. That would be petty sentiment and kitsch (we've been over this topic, recently) and that's bad. So, for a realist work to be accepted within the dogmatic world of Arte Moderne, it must insist on negative aspects of humanity, not positive ones. So, in a Freud portrait, the British Queen is portrayed as a (cadaverous) old lady, warts and all, rather than as a monarch with a long tradition and a true legacy behind her. That is what portraits are, or at least, were, largely about, isn't it? Not about vanity, although that may sometimes play into it, but rather, portraits are a legacy for the future of the family/company/country. A hundred years from now, will Queen Elizabeth's family, or the country, prefer the Freud portrait from 2003, or say, the Pietro Annigoni portrait of 1956? Same goes for Kate Moss's descendants.
Freud's portraits are not legacies, nor are they anything about the sitters. Instead, he is making statements about himself and of the current art world, and about the world in general, I suppose. Mostly, though, it is self-centred and that, in the final analysis, is the major flaw of all of Modern art.
