The Past Was Better, Part 1: Color
Where my People Of Color at?
“The Past Was Better” is a new series I am doing on The Accelerationist. As the name suggests, the series is dedicated to exploring ways in which, well, the past was better than the current day, not in theoretical and abstract, but in concrete, factual, and demonstrable ways. Feel free to suggest ways The Past Was Better in the comments.
In previous adaptations of the SF classic Dune, the main villain Baron Harkonnen wears highly colorful robes. In Denis Villeneuve’s contemporary adaptation, he is pale and wears black. (Thank you to @ManletThorin on Twitter for pointing it out.)
As a matter of fact, color has been literally draining away from our lives.
A study by the UK’s Science Museum Group Digital Lab used an algorithm to look at the colors of 7000 objects from daily life from museum collection, and found that black, grey, and white colors were 15% of the colors in 1800—compared to almost half today.
In 1952, 3 cars out of 4 sold were either red, green, or blue. Today, 3 cars out of 4 sold are either white, grey, or black. (Source)
The world of interior design is also completely drab. Monochrome interiors are the rule—contrast this to the bright colors of ‘60s and ‘70s home décor, and indeed going back several centuries. (See below, a screenshot of a random Instagram interior design account.)
Movies in general look darker and less colorful, and remakes and adaptations are the best ways to see that this is true, given that you can compare with the original and the source material. The “Medieval Filter” plays a huge role, but this isn’t just true of historical movies.
Color is simply disappearing from our lives. According to France Culture, a big culprit is the artistic avant-garde. In the 1920s, several architects such as Le Corbusier, Theo van Doesburg, as well as the Soviet architecture school, “launched a crusade against color.”
The Scottish artist David Batchelor wrote an essay appropriately titled Chromophobia, decrying how the world of the artistic avant-garde looks down on color and wants everything to be black, white, and grey. You may not care about the artistic avant-garde, but the avant-garde cares about you: to this day, trends that start in contemporary art trickle down to tastemakers, and thence to the rest of society: where do you think these trends in movies and interior design come from?
But pointing to the avant-garde is too simple an explanation, or only raises further questions. Ok, avant-garde artists and tastemakers push dark, grey, colorlessness on us, but why? Yes, because they’re communists and they hate beauty, ok. But that’s not a satisfying explanation.
I would venture that if a historian from 500 years now got to look at all the pictures and ask the same question, he would have a very simple and satisfying explanation: because our society is decadent and sad and getting more so.
In any case, this is the true structural racism. Beige Supremacy is everywhere, and my fellow People of Color need to rise up.
And in the meantime, we have a pretty objective way in which The Past Was Better. You’re welcome.
Isn’t it also interesting that the sepia and black/white filters which are used to represent nostalgia and the past respectively are there to remove color from the world. From that perspective, we are made to believe that the world is more colorful now through these brown-tinged glasses.
I think it's a part of the great push toward abstraction. Shape & color are inseparable, we figure it a fundamental fact, it's constitutive to our perception.
In a conventional way, the arts remove color by limiting it to grey, thus they emphasize shape only, which is supposed to make objects more obvious as objects, with fewer distractions, for example, because our sentiments are stirred by vivid colors.
Further, the push for abstraction is part of a greater contrast between technology & nature: Nature is unpredictably colorful, but technology is in our control, proved by draining color. Drained of color means object of technical rationality; colorful means, we didn't make it, it's not known to us. No color means liberation, therefore.
Finally, this should lead to a new kind of imagination, perhaps a new kind of humanity, since desire will be rationalized.