Culture Critic

Look at car colors since 1990. Paint suppliers are seeing huge shifts toward black, gray, silver and white color preferences. 80% of new cars are now grayscale...

Ridley Scott's "Napoleon" made sets and costumes that are vibrant in reality look utterly lifeless on screen. Muted color grades (that blue/gray wash over everything) are the new normal in cinema.

Yesterday, we were told HBO is rebranding Max — again. The big change? It will go from using blues to a duller combination of black and white.

In fact, colors in all objects have been steadily neutralized since 1800, per a study of photos of 7000 objects in the UK Science Museum. What is behind the relentless shift to neutrality?

It's partly materials. Moving from wood to metals and plastics led to more neutral color schemes...

But David Batchelor's book "Chromophobia" argues that it goes back to very birth of Western thinking. Plato, Aristotle, and thinkers that followed saw color as opposed to the higher workings of the mind.

Plato famously saw the world of sight as a deceptive "prison-house". Color is a sensory experience, and humans should look beyond the sensory world to uncover truth (using reason).

Aristotle thought lines, not color, contain the soul and meaning of an image. The essence of a thing is its form — what makes a chair a chair, not just a pile of wood.

Later thinkers like Rousseau and Kant agreed, stating that the drawing of forms is what gives life to color. Color can only add charm to art, but has no bearing on aesthetic judgement because it is purely sensory.

So, color in the Western mind represents chaos and form represents order and rationality. Maybe that's why brands that want to be taken "seriously" choose muted storefronts, unlike a colorful book shop with no such ambitions.

But minimalism takes this further. When the modernists stripped all detail from architectural design, it was a kind of extreme rationalism that distilled everything to its basic form.

As Adolf Loos raved: "we have gone beyond ornament, we have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity." Color was primitive and must be purged along with everything else. Only form mattered.

The result was copy-paste, colorless architecture that comes from nowhere and yet exists everywhere.

There's no single explanation for the achromatic shift across industries. But commercial incentives is a big one: appeal to the broadest possible tastes and offend no one.

Appeasing homogenous, mass consumer markets improves profits in all sorts of things. There's a related shift in music, where complexity is being stripped out to appeal to worldwide streaming audiences.

Going back to Plato, maybe the best art is that which gives sensory and rational concerns equal weight. Baroque art overwhelmed the senses with color — but with enough form to challenge you profoundly...

If these threads interest you, join my free newsletter! We write about culture, art and history every week. Join 110,000 others to get it in your inbox 👇 https://www.culture-critic.com...