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Creamy white skin, sleepy, scary black eyes, a shock of spiky black hair and vivid arched lips, the colour of cherries.

This is Sid Vicious all over the newsstands, on the cover of this month's Art in America, as painted by American contemporary artist Elizabeth Peyton. Peyton is also famous for her images of Kurt Cobain in a gold tiara and corset, and of Elvis Presley as a child, being held by his mother Gladys against a background of pink and orange roses.

In other words, much of her Live Forever exhibition, a retrospective on view at Minneapolis, Minn.'s Walker Art Center until June 14, is devoted to the pretty, terrible stars who have become mythic in the manner that critic Roland Barthes described Greta Garbo, whose face represents, Barthes wrote, "a kind of absolute state of the flesh."

It is hard to imagine how Vicious, born Simon John Ritchie in 1957 and dead 30 years this month, has metamorphosed from a gangly, blemished demi-monster, into a sleek, maddeningly gorgeous iconic figure.

Jon Savage argues in England's Dreaming, his book on the Sex Pistols and late 1970s punk, that Vicious has entered myth because of "punk's drive to failure" and its "Rimbaudian script: Live fast, disorder your senses, flame brightly before self-immolation."

But why is Vicious back, bigger and brighter than ever?

The recent re-visioning of Vicious has been helped along by his authorized biographer, Alan Parker, who published Vicious: Too Fast To Live in 2004 and, last fall, No One Is Innocent, a book determined to exonerate the Sex Pistols bass player, who was charged with murder in the stabbing death of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in New York's Chelsea Hotel in 1978, four months before his own heroin overdose.

The book, which Vicious's mother Anne Beverley urged Parker to write to clear her son's name (before her own suicide in 1996), argues ineffectually that Spungen was likely murdered in a fight with a drug dealer, or - incredibly, given her injury - that she committed suicide.

The evidence: money missing from a drawer, the presence of a drug-dealer, an anonymous call to 911. Beverley also claimed to have discovered a note written by Sid that declared his innocence.

Parker asks the same questions in Who Killed Nancy? a documentary that premiered in London this month.

If the Kurt Cobain conspiracy theories seem fundamentally flawed, the Vicious-is-innocent argument is merely ridiculous. The presence of a drug dealer was a constant in the squalid room of these two morbid junkies, and if someone called the police, surely they could have simply been expressing compassion for the 20-year-old girl, who died in agony from a stab wound to the belly.

Yet many still believe Vicious, an ill-tempered heroin addict, infamous for a series of assaults, was incapable of killing, or even hurting anyone.

Sex Pistols lead singer John Lydon (Johnny Rotten), the soi-disant authority on the Pistols, if not punk itself, has said that Vicious could not possibly have hurt someone. Lydon, who cries at the mention of his old friend's name, also would appear to suffer from painful guilt for having derided Vicious in life and death, as Parker's book explicates in awful detail. Are we turning to Vicious as an emblem because we are exhausted with Lydon's interminable reminiscing and startled by his coarse aging?

After all, Vicious gets to remain young forever, and, since he was never much for talking, we get to fill his now-long silence with ideas, impulses and emotions he likely never had (leaving aside the mawkish poem he wrote for Spungen after her death, which demonstrates a certain adroitness with sentimentality). Few ever cared about Nancy Spungen: When she was killed, many more were thrilled. Designer Vivienne Westwood put aside the making of her swastika T-shirts and produced the following, immoral atrocity: a picture of Vicious under the words, "She's Dead, I'm Alive, I'm Yours."

Despised for the reasons Yoko Ono and Courtney Love were (and are), Spungen was also, by all accounts, irritating in the extreme.

Vicious was hardly charming, but he was, in his very ruin, sensational - extreme in both his appearance and actions, a charismatic, beautiful beast.

In A Moveable Feast, over an argument about a tie, a drunken F. Scott Fitzgerald asks a confused Hemingway why he is always "making mysteries."

We might ask ourselves the same question.

When Vicious was arrested he told the police he killed Spungen, "because I'm a dirty dog."

Thirty years later, would it not be in our best interests to accept that he was telling the truth? The media has referred to Parker's work as a "punk mystery," but the only mystery available is the face of Sid Vicious, becoming more indelible as time goes by.

Here is one clue: If you can't be interesting, the poet Frank O'Hara observed, "at least you can be a legend."

lcrosbie@globeandmail.com

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