There’s No Accounting For It : TASTE: The Secret Meaning of Things, <i> By Stephen Bayley (Pantheon: $24; 237 pp.)</i>

Some like it hot,

Some like it cold,

Some like it in the pot

Nine days old.

--Nursery rhyme

Taste is surely among the most vexing and beguiling of questions, in a league with sex and money. Only the most secure among us don’t worry about taste some of the time. When we choose a picture for the wall, or the paint for the wall itself, when we offer an opinion about a movie or a meal, one of the questions in our mind is, What are we saying about ourselves?

The idea of taste as “a metaphor for choice is a peculiarly modern, Western faculty,” according to Stephen Bayley in this provocative book, which he calls a “suggestive essay” on the history and nature of taste.

Taste often seems artificial (“You say tomato, I say to-maht-o”) and yet omnipotent. Like assassination theories, taste can be seen to explain everything. Only one thing about taste is certain: It changes. It would be comforting to think there are definable standards, that certain principles will always obtain, but of course we know that’s not true. Bayley quotes some of the better attempts at codification. Architect Richard Rogers puts it interestingly: “Taste is the enemy of aesthetics. . . . It is abstract, at best elegant and fashionable, it is always ephemeral. . . . It can always be challenged and is always being superseded. . . . Good design on the other hand speaks to us across the ages.” Yes, but by whose lights? All such rules change over time. Taste itself, even more than codes of taste, is finally fugitive.

One era will embrace ornament, another its opposite. Bayley points to London’s Albert Memorial. It was built in the 1860s--spires, gewgaws and all--in a style I’ve heard described as “Gothic-berserk.” It was to honor Prince Albert, sponsor of the Great Exhibition of 1851, a venture designed “to improve public taste.”

A generation later, Adolph Loos (1870--1933), the Viennese architect and pamphleteer, thought ornament itself was a crime, that it “inflicts serious injury on people’s health.” Loos developed a following, as Modernism demonstrates.

A little closer to home, there are probably reasonable people who think the mini-mall that sits so forlornly in the hulking shadow of the Beverly Center a triumph of Postmodernism. Others will recognize it for the blight that it is. None of this will affect tastemeisters yet unborn who may point to it as an example of the emptiness of the 1980s, or perhaps as the misunderstood Chartres of a bygone era.

Bad taste--everyone’s favorite subject, because it’s often funny and because it allows us to believe we have good taste--is well represented here. A 1909 German catalogue declared that ashtrays made of postage stamps, chocolate busts of the Kaiser and books with wide margins were in bad taste.

Bayley trots cheerfully through the history of the last few centuries, stopping to discuss a diverse cast of design heroes and villains and the various schools they formed, represented or rebelled against. Here are a few:

Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, mistress of Louis XV, better known as Madame de Pompadour, was France’s first arbiter of taste. She combined “social aspiration and modern taste . . . a relationship . . . more or less inseparable ever since.” As she bought and decorated a dizzying string of houses and palaces, Madame de Pompadour turned her taste into “a vision of haut-bourgeois style.” The “ ancien regime’s version of born to shop,” she died at 42, possibly “a consequence of her preferred diet of vanilla, truffles and celery.”

Michael Thonet (1796-1871) was a German cabinet maker who served as a bridge between cabinetry in the old style of craftsmen like Sheraton and Chippendale, and modern methods of mass production whereby everyone could have “elegant, inexpensive, good pieces.” Unlike the tradition Thonet had trained in, every Thonet chair was alike. His technical achievement was in lamination, which replaced hand-cutting for curved surfaces; his more mysterious gift was what Bayley calls “industrialized perfectibility.”

Brahms composed at the piano in a Thonet chair. Lenin is said to have had one. By the mid-1920s, when the Thonet Company switched to tubular steel, 100 million of the Thonet No. 14 chair had been made. I once owned a pair of them, and chances are you’ve sat in them too. According to Bayley, they “transcend taste because (their) form and content (are) in perfect harmony and balance.” But when they were new and fighting for acceptance, Americans, at least, preferred the furniture of one Johan-Heinrich Belter, who produced furniture that was as bizarre as it was popular. Belter’s overwrought, uncomfortable-looking chairs and sofas had enough decoration to make one think that Adolph Loos had a point.

It has often been said of Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950) that her specialty was introducing new American money to old French furniture. With Syrie Maugham, she was one of the first decorator-stars. Her book, “The House in Good Taste,” was an attack on middle-class notions of decor. She mixed the expensive with the interesting, the old with what appealed of the new, and she always took her commission. At her best, she had a refreshing clarity. She dyed her hair blue, stood on her head, married a lord (she was Lady Mendl) and wound up in Los Angeles, though Bayley doesn’t mention it.

There are many more characters bounding through these pages, famous and obscure, including Philip Johnson, who gets roughed up a bit, and Ralph Lauren, who gets off easy (a “heroic mishmash of other people’s symbols”). Le Corbusier, who thought he could eradicate taste by revealing the laws of architecture, is here as a beacon of modernism. Corbu lived long enough to see his ideas debased in what must have appeared to him to be all the office towers of the world. At the end of his life he remarked: “Life is right and architecture is wrong.” There are asides on the nature of kitsch and the erotic properties of high-heeled shoes as well as a diatribe about the architectural taste of the Prince of Wales, which Bayley calls “nostalgic”--a word he uses the way our friend Adolph Loos used “ornament.”

Bayley’s argument in all this is elusive. In addition to an abiding faith in modernism and simplicity, his central thesis appears to be: “The modern question of taste is utterly dependent on the ideas of consumption fostered in industrial and post-industrial cultures.”

Bayley has a predictably snide view of the United States that probably plays better in the United Kingdom, where this book originally was published. He has a tendency to make sweeping statements that collapse of their own weight under any sort of scrutiny: “Most people learn the fundamentals of interior design from their experience of restaurants.”

Nonetheless “Taste,” with its well-chosen illustrations and wide-ranging erudition, is always stimulating. Agreement isn’t the issue here, any more than it is between generations or centuries; rather, the goal is illumination and insight, which Bayley delivers in his study of this endlessly fascinating subject. Chacun a son gout.