Ornament and Crime was a lecture attacking ornament in art by the influential and self-consciously "modern" Austrian architect Adolf Loos, written in 1908 but first given on 21 January 1910 in Vienna and first published in Cahiers d'aujourd'hui (issue 5 of 1913) under the German title Ornament und Verbrechen. It was under this challenging title that in 1913 the essay was translated into French; it was not published in German until 1929. "The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects", Loos proclaimed, linking the optimistic sense of the linear and upward progress of cultures with the contemporary vogue for applying evolution to cultural contexts.