Although beauty has occupied philosopher's passions at least since Plato's time, ugliness has rarely gotten its fair share of critical attention. Now, British social commentator and design critic Steven Bayley--of whom Tom Wolfe once said, "I don't know anybody with more interesting observations about style, taste and contemporary design"--is turning his keen eye to the very notion of ugliness. "Ugliness offends the natural order, even as it helps to define it," he wrote in the Sunday Times not long ago. "So the human adventure is a gradient with the ugly at one end and the beautiful at the other: we are all on that slope, aspiring in one direction while desperate to avoid the sickening gravitational pull of the other." Here he weaves centuries of art and design history into a far-reaching discourse on the unbearable and the grotesque. Can something that is outwardly beautiful--a B52 bomber or a Colt .45--also be ugly, if its function is to kill or to maim? Why was "Degenerate Art" considered so unacceptable? Why are mountains seen as sublime expressions of nature, when only 200 years ago they were regarded as loathsome things to be avoided at all costs? Why is there a contest for "The Ugliest Dog in the World"? Stephen Bayley has the answers, and they're not pretty. Stephen Bayley (born 1951) is one of the world's best-known commentators on design and popular culture, and author of the books A Dictionary of Idiocy, General Knowledge and Life's a Pitch .

In the early 1980s he oversaw the Boilerhouse Project--Britain's first permanent design exhibition--at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and later became Chief Executive of the Design Museum in London. He has worked as a design consultant for, among others, Ford, Absolut Vodka, Coca-Cola, Volkswagen and BMW. A bestselling author and an outspoken authority on design and art, he is a regular contributor to numerous newspapers and magazines.