A shabby part of east London has been prettified: the site of the main Olympic Park was until recently rough scrubland containing piles of rotting fridges and a dirty river.
The French artist's tales of torture and abuse are scarcely cheery – think a mildly prettified Louise Bourgeois – but then who ever said that art had to be nice, eh?
When, in the 1740s, he had grown sick to death of painting Venice over and over again, he decamped to London for about a decade, and prettified and reorganised various grand sights on the banks of the Thames – rather as he had occasionally embellished and prettified and reorganised his Venetian scenes.
For him, the memorial prettified and anaesthetised the blood and gore.
In the basement are 13 original watercolours by Adolf Hitler that the Chapman brothers have prettified, mainly by adding concentric rainbows in garish colours.
Even better, Ives's music made me see rivers differently; centuries of classical music had prettified them, ignoring their reality in order to turn them into musical objects.
In her staging of the rape scene that drives Blanche over the edge, Blanche collapses on the bed, only to have her degradation prettified by an invented postcoital dumb show.
But, prettified or not, Hemingway's style was the most influential in American prose for more than fifty years, and this makes Stein's style less an outcropping than a bedrock of modern American writing.
Her friends intended to praise her, though, in effect, they buried her — morally prettified and embalmed, hands folded piously over her bosom.
He had written to his editor there that it was "now a great big valentine.... Let somebody else write 'The Tears with Ross,' " and to the Whites that it would emerge "toujours gai," with the magazine's weaknesses mostly "smoothed over, left out, but not prettified".
He hated books that prettified the stuff of ordinary life and speech, that rendered "motherfucking" as "motherloving".
