Blogged By: De De Tillman

Source & Story Credit: Fox News  –  National Enquirer

Photo Credit Link: National Enquirer

Posted: Thursday March 1, 2012 @ 8:30 P.M PST

In the face of criticism over what some have  described as a “shameful” decision to put Whitney  Houston’s corpse on the cover of their magazine this week, the publisher of  the National Enquirer told FoxNews.com that she thought the cover was a work of  art.

“I thought it was beautiful,” publisher Mary Beth  Wright told FoxNews.com.

Fellow members of the media attacked the  publication’s decision as tasteless and morbid.

The Washington Post declared that “a line had been  crossed.” The website Jezebel called it morbid and the site 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.”

The 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.

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

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 mag published a photograph  of the singer Elvis  Presley in his coffin. They 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  percent of FoxNews.com readers said that the Enquirer publishing the photographs  was a shame, but par for the course for them. Thirty-seven percent said that it  was reprehensible and 21 percent said they saw absolutely nothing wrong with  it.

“Whoever sold that photo of  Whitney Houston in her coffin to the National Enquirer sold their soul in the  process,” one fan tweeted yesterday.

Another added on the social media  site: “So ppl really scooped this low by selling Whitney Houston dead in her  coffin photo shame on you, she can’t even rest in peace.”

While the tabloid magazine was the  first to publish actual photographs of Houston’s body, her funeral on Saturday  was covered by just about every mainstream media outlet in the world. The AP’s  livestream of the funeral had a reported 2 million viewers.

NATIONAL ENQUIRER WHITNEY HOUSTON BODY IN OPEN CASKET PHOTO:WHITNEY HOUSTON BODY IN OPEN CASKET PHOTO LINK