Michael Jackson's face was Klimt as drawn by a plastic surgeon

Pop star Michael Jackson is pictured in his Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department booking mug in Santa Barbara, California (Reuters/Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department/Handout) Photograph: HO/Reuters

I'll come clean at once. I liked Michael Jackson More ­precisely, I liked the ­specific feature of Michael Jackson that all but ­monopolised the tabloid ­attention paid to him throughout his ­career, most of it disobliging in the ­extreme: his face. I especially liked it when it was still in its sultry prime and had already become a mythic object.

It was a face within quotation marks, a face that was both itself and the ­prodigiously stylised representation of itself. Beauty is only skin deep, but Jackson's face, as it then was, offered manifest proof that it could be even shallower than that. Except that, for the majority of beholders, beauty wasn't the word for it: it was more or less universally regarded as a monstrosity.

Jackson's face fascinated me. It was the face of an adolescent ­masturbator, dishevelled, drained and ashy-white; of a silent film star, its unnerving ­ghoulishness presenting itself less as the negation than, in the ­photographic sense of the word, the negative of its original ­blackness. A made-to-measure face, it was its own caricature, its own Aubrey Beardsley pen-and-ink portrait.

It was a face that reminded me of Nijinsky; of the eccentric socialite the Marchesa Casati, she of the anorexic torso, lipstick-slashed lips and jet-black eyelashes; of Alla Nazimova, Rudolph Valentino's mistress, in her grotesque silent screen adaptation of Wilde's Salome; of Valentino himself; of the tragic, elegant Beast played by Jean Marais in La Belle et la Bête; of Barbette, the transvestite acrobat celebrated by that film's director, Jean Cocteau; of virtually any of Fellini's characters; of one of those androgynous ephebes who haunt the unreadable and now unread contes cruels of Jean Lorrain and James Branch Cabell; of Dorian Gray, not as painted by Wilde's fictitious portraitist, Basil Hallward, but as photographed by, let's say, Cecil Beaton; of, finally, the Mona Lisa, not at all as painted by ­Leonardo but rather as rhapsodised by Walter Pater in a celebrated purple ­passage. ("She is older than the rocks among which she sits … like the ­vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave … and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.") It was, to put it whimsically, the face, livid and divine, of an angel with jet lag.

Its power, moreover, as an object of contemplation was intensified by its apparent disconnection from its owner's body. The only thing one knew of ­Jackson's body was the flamboyantly Ruritanian outfits that camouflaged it. It was almost as though there were nothing to know under those gaudy uniforms: his nakedness was literally ­unthinkable, unconjurable, ­unconjecturable. What was the tincture of his body skin? Had he had a "body job" to match the nose job, pigment job, etc? These were ­meaningless questions.

Was it, though, what anyone would call a beautiful face? I'd like to propose a paradoxical axiom: beauty has no need of beauty. When Picasso, to take the obvious example, painted a beautiful woman, he rendered her ­unbecoming, even downright ugly, so that the ­painting itself would be beautiful.

In the relatively recent past of ­western art history – in, specifically, the commissioned portraiture of the 18th and 19th centuries – an era when beauty was routinely piled upon beauty, the smooth, suave loveliness of the painter's style functioned as the correlate of his model's physical beauty. By contrast, in almost all 20th-century represent­ational art of importance, a dialectical tension existed between the respective, ostensibly incompatible, beauties of subject and style. The most distinctively personal work of the majority of modern ­portraitists was achieved only by the ruthless deprettification of their models, often to the point of unrecognisability.

What was ­extraordinary about Michael Jackson is that he contrived to perform the same operation – deprettifying the self in order to enhance, ­aesthetically, the public representation of that same self – on his own face. He didn't need a canvas – his own face was the canvas. That he became his own self-portrait (literally) isn't in itself exceptional; it is, after all, the entire point and purpose of Placstic Surgery The difference in his case was that the result bore absolutely no resemblance to one of those ­fawning society portraits that are themselves the artistic equivalents of plastic ­surgery. If his face could be compared to anything in art, it would be to the warped and wonderful stylisations of Klimt, Schiele, Van Dongen, Beckmann, even Grosz.

A lot of its fascination, of course, derived from its strange colour. Leaving aside his own belief-beggaring protest­ations that the bleaching of his skin was the consequence of some ­dermatological disorder, it was perfectly clear that the primary motive behind his wilful self-transformation, from cute frizzy-haired black adolescent to his subsequent whiteness, was of a racist nature.

Such descriptive qualifiers as "black" and "white", though, are notoriously reductive. Nobody's skin is either ­literally black or white. White people are, if you want to be pedantic about it, mostly pink, while black people come in a generous spectrum of fleshy browns. But Jackson, who as an infant was conventionally "black", became not merely "white" but as white as a sheet of paper. It was as though it wasn't enough for him to become "white" in the ­conventional sense of the word; as though ­nothing less would satisfy him than to be ­incontrovertibly white, the diametric, almost binary, antithesis of black.

Nor was his whiteness just a question of skin tone. Think of his eyes and nose. Then think of the very word "eye", as it's printed on this page in lower-case letters. If ever there existed a word that was an ideogrammatic, visually ­onomatopoeic mise en abyme, then that word is "eye". What does it resemble if not a pair of heavy-lidded eyes, ­forming a minute isosceles triangle with the dainty skewwhiff nose of the "y", a nose uncannily like Jackson's own? Again, I say (and despite the fact that it gave rise to as much mockery as Cyrano's ­tumescent ­schnozzle), I thought it as pretty a nose as a putto's in a Tiepolo altarpiece.

As it was, however, ­conspicuously not an African-American nose, it seemed to offer further evidence that ­Jackson's ambition was to transcend all the ­rudimentary racial categories of "black" and "white". His goal was patently to be not just white but whiter-than-white, not just Wasp but Wasper-than-Wasp. It was as though what he always craved was to embody a single-member species of hyper-whiteness, hyper-Waspness, hyper-Aryanism, one that would be as "superior" to the white race as, in the codified racist hierarchy, the white race itself is claimed to be to the black.