Dead Whitney cover was 'beautiful' art - Herald Sun

THE publisher of the National Enquirer has defended her decision to put a picture of Whitney Houston's corpse on the cover.

"I thought it was beautiful," publisher Mary Beth Wright told FOXNews.com.

Fellow members of the media attacked the publication's decision as tasteless.

The Washington Post declared that "a line had been crossed".

The website Jezebel called it morbid and The Daily Caller added, "Running an image of Whitney Houston's lifeless body on the cover is pretty par for the course for The National Enquirer, but it's still a bit much."

Houston, 48, was found submerged in the bath tub in her Beverly Hills hotel room earlier this month.

The magazine's photo shows the late singer dead in a gold casket with the headline, "Whitney: The Last Photo!"

The image is believed to have been taken inside the Whigham Funeral Home in Newark, New Jersey.

Accompanying headlines lure readers in with the promise to bring them inside Whitney's private funeral, offering details that she was buried in $500,000 of jewelry with gold slippers on her feet.

The photograph does not bear a credit, and The Enquirer is not releasing any details about how they obtained it.

No one from Houston's family has called the photograph out as fraudulent.

Magazine photo editors estimated that a coffin photograph like the one published by the Enquirer could sell in the mid six-figure range or even higher. 

This isn't the first time the Enquirer has published photographs of dead or dying celebrities.

In 1977 the magazine published a photograph of the singer Elvis Presley in his coffin. It published a photograph of John Lennon following his death in 1980.

"The Enquirer struck again with its latest cover featuring Whitney Houston in a casket. It's just another disgusting display of how low celebrity obsession can stoop. Regardless of how they obtained the picture - and the likely exorbitant price they paid for it - the Enquirer should have thought twice about this post-mortem portrait," Denise Warner, the executive editor of the website HollywoodLife.com told Fox411.

"No one needs to remember Whitney preserved in formaldehyde. And it's certainly not an image that is necessary in the discussion of her life and death."

When polled on Wednesday, over 100,000 FOXNews.com readers weighed in on the National Enquirer cover.

Forty per cent said that the Enquirer publishing the photographs was a shame, but par for the course for them.

Thirty-seven per cent said that it was reprehensible and 21 per cent said they saw absolutely nothing wrong with it.