Should Myra Hindley hang? Most Britons would probably answer yes to the woman and no to the painting. The painting in question is by Marcus Harvey, who has used a child-sized cast of a hand to print on a giant, sinisterly mesmerizing canvas the black, white, and grey pixel marks of the instantly familiar police mugshot of Britain’s most notorious child murderer. Myra, four meters high and almost as wide, has become a talking point of “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection”—the blockbuster show, at London’s Royal Academy of Arts through December 28, that was always destined to live up to its name in tabloid terms.

The Moors Murders took place in Yorkshire in the early 1960s. The victims—all children—were slowly tortured (their death throes recorded on a tape machine) and then buried in the moors by Hindley and her associate, Ian Brady. Most of the bodies were never found. Hindley has been incarcerated ever since and, despite religious conversion and evident signs of remorse, stands little chance of reprieve: her case still arouses such strong emotion. Indeed, Hindley and her crimes remain an occasion for front-page news stories on the slightest pretexts. Some months ago the director of a child charity, Kidscape, called for a public boycott of the exhibition if the Royal Academy allowed the picture to be shown. Meanwhile, the mother of one of Hindley’s victims, Mrs. Winnie Johnson, pleaded for the offending item to be removed. When the academicians voted at