Ornament begins as luxury. The more ornamented a building, a piece of clothing or an item of jewellery, the more labour has gone into its production and the more expensive it is. The Industrial Revolution and machine production changed everything. Suddenly decoration became cheap. Which coincided with the economic need for growth - the manufacture of more and more (decorated) stuff. This, in essence, is the argument of Marx, Morris, Loos and Veblen. Decoration characterised as a mechanism for capital to produce and sell more useless crap to the masses.

Of course, as soon as ornament becomes cheap, elite taste moves on. If decoration is suddenly cheap, then the plainer an object, the more valuable it suddenly becomes. This is, effectively, the birth of Modernism as described by Pevsner and others, the stripped aesthetic of the Bauhaus or the Arts and Crafts where the effort now goes not into ornamentation but into making the building or the product so that it appears simple. But with the added dimension of morality. The stripping-off of ornament suddenly becomes an ethical duty, which leads to the moralising (rather than necessarily moral) arguments of the Modernists.

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The world’s most popular architect - by the most measurable means, entry tickets - is Antoni Gaudí. Twice as many people visit the Sagrada Família each year (3.2 million plus) as live in Barcelona (1.6 million) itself. It is not an accident that Gaudí is also the most obsessively decorative architect of modernity. His work gives us a depth of decoration and interest that the Barcelona Pavilion - despite its sublimity and cult status for us architects - cannot ever match. Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, they may have indulged in outrageous kitsch but they become ever bigger cults not through their composition or their handling of a plan or the way they manipulate light in space but because of their use of ornament and its transferability into other media - tea towels, coasters, scarves, posters and so on.

We might think that with the sublimation of Postmodernism (look at the pleas to list No 1 Poultry, PoMo is now historic and acceptable), pluralism and the anything-goes attitude embodied in a contemporary art scene that finds room for Grayson Perry, Chris Ofili, Peter Doig and Pablo Bronstein, we have come to terms with ornament. But we have not. Not even a tiny bit. Some parts of design culture have addressed the discrepancy between the (middle-class) taste for Minimalism and the (working-class) enthusiasm for kitsch through an effort to introduce a Minimalist interface between the two. This is fascinating because whereas once ornament and decoration were the mechanism through which architects communicated, now that mechanism is the high design interface - the iPhone or the iPad which is the Minimalist device through which we mask our kitsch tastes for cute kittens, celebrity bikini disasters or selfies taken on a stick against a background of Gaudí.