Gilt and pleasure

In the 20th century, the ideological successors and companions of Loos, like the Bauhaus and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, created the international style

Draw a flower, carefully unfurling its petals. Follow the line of its sinuous stem, adding tendrils to its flow, extending and multiplying their curves, sprouting a bud here and a leaf exactly there. Repeat, with loose wrist and elegant variation, and an ornament is born. Surely making and looking at them an innocent even natural, pleasure? 

Hardly. Over the centuries, the use of ornament (and its fraternal twin, decoration, used here interchangeably) has waxed and waned. Perhaps it’s the association of pleasure with guilt; or of surface beauty with superficiality or even deception, but ornament’s street rep has always been