This research discusses the mid-nineteenth century exhibition of non-representational ornament at the world's first museum of decorative art, the South Kensington Museum (today's Victoria and Albert). At its inception, the Museum, which was established to improve the public taste, heavily drew on the Design Reformers' theories of the "universal" principles of beauty. As it favored the non-representational designs from the "Orient," a vaguely defined group of objects was formed, which would later be grouped together and labeled "Islamic art." This research discusses the gradual formation of this category at the South Kensington Museum to explore the contingency of this art historical class, both internally, regarding its components, and externally, within art historical system. The utility of this art historical notion is discussed in the context of the Museum's shift away from its original educational purpose toward an art historical connoisseurship. The Museum's first stage was governed by the Design Reformers in whose hands the ambiguous concept of the "Orient" was employed to reformulate the relation between art and ornament. This research argues that the art of the "Orient" which was held in an ambivalent position of simultaneously historical/cultural and ahistorical/natural, played a performative role in demarcating the Western/Christian/Modern art. This approach is then contrasted to the Hegelian art history that later governed the Museum and reformulated the "Orient." Now stained with "otherness," these objects were placed in art historical categories. This taxonomy is interpreted as the Museum's response to the public's reaction to the initial arrangement to discuss two interconnected functions of the Hegelian art history---framing the "other" and taming the object of desire.