… the bad, and the ugly

At Oxford in 1960, I had history tutorials from Alan Bennett. Just before he shot to stardom in the revue Beyond the Fringe, he was writing a thesis on the retinue of
Richard II. Another of his pupils was David Bindman, later a professor of art history at London University. I was collecting pottery and Bindman already had an impressive collection of drawings.

In his book Untold Stories (2005), Bennett wrote:

David Bindman would show me Old Master drawings he had picked up for a song, and Bevis Hillier would fetch along ceramics. I knew little of either and could neither confirm nor deny the confident attributions both boys put forward. But they taught me a more useful lesson than I ever taught them, namely that my own taste was for surfaces.

Stephen Bayley says much the same thing, in different words, in his intriguing, clever, curious, maddening book:

For as long as I can remember, I have been helplessly engrossed with the look of things. It may be attributed to a crude infatuation with superficialities and effects.

Absolutely addicted to rhetorical questions (not all of them answered) he begins the book with one:

The construct of beauty versus ugliness is one of the most perplexing in our imaginations. Is there actually such a thing as ugliness? It’s a commonplace to assume the answer is yes.

‘Ugly’ is a politically incorrect word. If we think a man ugly, we may call him ‘not conventionally handsome’. In England, an ill-favoured woman is ‘plain’; the French give her a nice exemption clause in the expression ‘jolie laide’. I think Bayley has chosen Ugly as the title of his book for its provocativeness, its shock value. His core subject is really taste; and maybe a reason for avoiding that word in the title is that ‘taste’ suggests coteries of supercilious cognoscenti looking down on things.