Beth Ditto and the truth about beauty

In this Facebook world we are expected to elevate almost everyone and everything into the category of beauty when, for the most part, all that is celebrated is rubbish art, hideous clothes or overweight people.

It is not PC to say so, but I believe for instance that Beth Ditto (pictured), the singer and cover girl, is merely fat - quite apart from muddling her with Beth Chatto, the garden lady. There's nothing wrong with being fat, or indeed new about putting fat women in fashion magazines - Richard Avedon and I used fat girls as models in an issue of Harper's Bazaar in 1965 - but there's a determined smugness about her and about those feting her. Much as I like Gareth Pugh, I think his clothes really are hideous. And most art now is merely silly.

Beauty has moved away from the eye of the beholder to the mind of the believer, and people swallow any drivel that's fed them, falling in line behind a slew of such cliched mantras as 'All Brazilians are beautiful'; some are, but the general assembly line perfection, a glut of Porsches in Speedos, palls in the sultry Copacabanian sun.

Well, Roger Scruton has written a little book entitled, boldly, Beauty (Oxford University Press, £10.99), exploring and pronouncing on almost every aspect of that fugitive subject at exhaustive, for such a tiny volume, length. While every other avenue of beauty is well trodden, and despite the fact that Scruton seems to have an absolute thing about place-settings, more that once extolling the beauty in a daintily-laid table and even printing a rather dull photograph of one, he touches on interior decoration merely in passing, lumping it in with clothes and "bodily adornment".

Not to include interior decoration as a facet of beauty seems strange. Surely a beautiful interior is a valid candidate for the canon? A room may be not only beautiful in itself, but as the setting to enhance human beauty, every bit as much as architecture and landscape. (And even though a room is man-made and carefully contrived, it can create an accidental, unintentional beauty – when someone praised Nancy Lancaster for the beauty of the