I WANT TO see a picture of Aniruddha Bahal, because I have a strong hunch that he has a third eye in the middle of his forehead. There is no picture of him in Faber’s catalogue of forthcoming titles for next spring, and in this he is unique. All Faber’s other fiction writers have mugshots with their blurbs.

There’s Andrew Motion, kissing his own forefinger. There’s Andrew O’Hagan, craggy, moody, like a star of Mr Right. There’s Lucy Wadham, staring out at the book trade like an Henri Cartier-Bresson model. There’s even Joseph Connolly, a Gandalf lookalike daring you to read him from under hooded eyes and a luxuriant duvet of beard.

They’re all there, Mr Bahal excepted, because although the good people at Faber won’t admit it, they believe we need to be reassured about a writer’s facial symmetry before bathing in his prose. And having reassured us, they will trot him out to launches, signings, parties, Groucho happenings, book fayres in Hay-on-Wye and artfully contrived collisions with every TV and radio presenter who could possibly plug their oeuvre until we’ve bought it.

It’s crazy but inevitable. Whatever the medium, we are fixated on the messenger. It started in Hollywood and oozed like spilt lacquer through the public life of the Western world until all our stars were beautiful, and their beauty was the chief sign of their talent.

The tyranny of beauty defines our private lives as well, more than we know. A seminal study of West Point graduates entering the US Armed Forces in the 1950s showed that those who conformed closest to the lantern-jawed archetype of the military man rose higher, faster than their rivals. Fifty years on, the research shows that handsome blokes earn 12 to 15 per cent more than their boot-faced colleagues, and that’s just the blokes. The differences for women are if anything greater, at all ages, in all walks of life.

There used to be exceptions. Authors long since went the way of the TV personalities with whom they must compete for our attention — what blessed relief for the marketing department at Canongate Books that Yann Martel, their Booker winner, turns out to be midlife pin-up material too — but in the highest of high arts pure talent was still sacred. It conferred on its owner at least a smidgeon of immunity from the rigours of the market.

Ballet demanded beauty as well as genius of its stars because it is a spectacle, but at least they were spared the obligation to perform like monkeys for their sponsors off the stage. In the world of opera, where the heavenly voices of the very few will always be born and not made, crowds still waited for the fat lady to sing.

And now? Now Darcey Bussell vamps for middle-aged businessmen at the Motor Show, and Cheryl Barker, a mignonne Australienne with tumbling black curls and the physique of a triathlete, is to sing Tosca with the ENO. The thing about Barker, as you may have gathered from the preview in yesterday’s T2, is that she is funny, fashionable and photogenic and will be singing opposite her husband, Peter Coleman-Wright. That makes her more than a performer. It makes her a story. That she has a world-class voice tends to get lost in the hype.

Barker is one star in a crowded firmament, but her selection for a role that used to be a catwalk for quivering heavyweights entitles us to ask whether the last bastion of pure artistry is falling to the tyranny of looks.

Is it over for the fat ladies? The question should trouble purists of every stripe, and the answer does look bad, though partly for good reasons. For one thing, Barker and others such as Angela Gheorghiu have exploded the myth that only enormous people can sing enormous roles. For another, because of the infinite perfectibility of the celluloid world to which we are constantly invited to compare our own, we are no longer willing to suspend our disbelief to the extent that watching middle-aged leviathans playing young, angelic lovers required. Given the choice between a Tosca who looks and moves like Tosca and one who looks and moves like a jukebox, opera producers and their allimportant sponsors will go for the svelte one.

We are tumbling towards a world in which the winners are all lookers. The trend infects all walks of life, but is exaggerated in the arts. It affects both sexes, but women more than men.

Name an ugly young female novelist. It would have been easy 140 years ago, as long as you knew that George Eliot was a woman. She was ugly. Ninety years ago there would have been Virginia Woolf; famously uncute. Now there are cuties everywhere, and only cuties. Zadie Smith. Arundhati Roy. Amanda Foreman. Donna Tartt. Their names and their ethereal countenances spill off the billboards and out of the broadsheet books sections straight into your cerebral book-buying cortex without passing Go. You browse. You check out the chick on the dust jacket. You buy.

Name an ugly young female pop star. Impossible. An ugly young female “crossover” artist. Even tougher (give me Vanessa Mae or the Playboy-happy Linda Brava over Britney Spears any time). OK. Name an ugly but ferociously talented young female classical soloist. That should be possible. But it isn’t. On the cello there’s Natalie Klein. On the fiddle there’s Chloe Hanslip. Both are brilliant; both, basically, adorable.