Ugliness is a fascinating concept. For me, there’s one question that pops into my mind when I think about it: what makes us view a certain object as ugly?

Perhaps it’s something to do with our evolutionary instincts; animal and human waste, for example, is generally ugly, both visually and in odor. Could this be a safeguard implemented by our body so that we don’t eat it? But that wouldn’t explain why there are objects that don’t pose a risk to our health that we view as ugly. Does it have to do with symmetry? Or color balance? Probably, but with every criteria for ugliness you think of, there are a host of exceptions that present themselves. Could it be partly random? Perhaps. And of course, our judgment of beauty and ugliness is subject to individual taste, which serves only to complicate things further.

When I began reading Stephen Bayley’s Ugly: The Aesthetics of Everything, I was excited to see what his answer to this question would be. Stephen Bayley is an award-winning British design critic. He’s written a host of books about style and design, has lectured at many universities, and curated several exhibitions at various museums. Ugly, his latest book, is an exploration of the concept of ugliness. Tom Wolfe said of Bayley, “I don’t know anybody with more interesting observations about style, taste and contemporary design.” He has written for a plethora of publications, and served as a design consultant to many different groups, including Ford, Coca-Cola, and BMW. Given how much he must have interacted with ugliness in his professional life, I couldn’t wait to see what his response to the seriously perplexing question of what exactly constitutes ugliness.

I was surprised, then, on finishing the book, to find that he hadn’t really tried to answer the question at all. He had written about several answers various historical persons and cultures had subscribed to – including the Shakers’ beliefs that ugliness lay in the unnecessary and useless and Gustav Pazaurek’s Principles of Ugliness – but with obvious flaws: they were all thoroughly unconvincing, and none of them were at all modern.

The fact that Bayley didn’t give an answer to this question (something that I think he was aware of, given that on multiple occasions he would acknowledge the lack of a definition for ugly, with phrases like “whatever ugly might mean”), does not lead me to the conclusion that the book failed to do what it set out to do. Rather, I think that Bayley did not make clear from the get-go what the book’s mission was, that ugliness is what the book would explain, and what it would leave unanswered. Bayley did not attempt to probe the issue of what ugliness is, philosophically. I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t a bit disappointed with this.

What Bayley did achieve, however, was a fascinating narrative of the historical evolution of the West’s attitude towards ugliness. He discusses everything from how the industrial revolution affected our ideas of ugliness, to the nineteenth century debate over whether or not the bicycle stands for everything that is ugly or everything that is beautiful. He talks about the role ugliness plays in advertising, the question of whether instruments of death like guns or bombs are ugly, and the different prominent opinions on kitsch (often cheap or sentimental decorative art). At one point, Bayley pokes fun at an obscure 1959 book called The History of the Concrete Roofing Tile: Its Origin and Development in Germany, and he is equally good at uncovering unexpected details in the history of ugliness, as when discussing the glass paperweight craze, or the relationship between Jesus and landfills. The reader is left with a wealth of information about a host of things he never thought worthy of attention.

Any review of the book would be woefully incomplete without a mention of the book’s hundreds of illustrations. Despite its name, the book is a visual treat, with fascinating photographs of everything from the interior of a Japanese McDonalds to the London’s Ugly Modeling Agency of 1969. The book is also rich with historical paintings; there’s a whole art gallery inside it. These illustrations are essential to the book. How dry would discussing the implications of John Constable’s Windmill Among Houses and Rainbow be without seeing the painting itself?

At the end of Bayley’s preface, he says, “I hope when you look and read Ugly you’ll begin to wonder exactly why we prefer the Boboli Gardens to the hellscape of Gehenna….” Well, if that was his mission, he certainly succeeded. Having been confronted with a book’s worth of examples of things that people have considered beautiful and ugly, the reader will certainly wonder why. But he will be left to answer that question himself.

It is incredibly hard, perhaps impossible, to isolate ugliness. There was not a single illustration in the entire book – not the painting of the man covered in oozing warts from ergotism, not the “ugliest bartender in the world,” not Lord Voldemort, that I can look at, point to, and say, “There. That’s ugly.” You try it yourself. Is there anything that when you stare at it for long enough, it doesn’t turn – dare I use the word – beautiful? I haven’t found that object for myself yet.