The unforgivable sin ...

... of noticing beauty

John Rockwell, an NYT dance critic, stirred up a hornet's nest recently when he wrote that for ballet dancers looks do count for reasons of (among others) "dramatic verisimilitude" and "romantic allusion". I don't think that this claim is in any way self evident. Opera singers for ex. often suffer from what a rhetoric prof once termed as "the problem of the undistributed middle" and I've seen pictures of Indian classical (male) dancers whose figure and face was nothing to write home about.

The article brings up some interesting points about how the 'hotness' of a performer colours our judgement in both positive and negative ways.