I for one don't like that car insurance companies do this, but this very likely is a huge reason why fewer people buy vehicles with colour beyond Grey/etc.

edit: ha, the book is mentioned halfway through the essay. I should finish reading before commenting.

I agree with the book's thesis - there's an impulse to associate colour with "the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological" in contemporary western society. We've somehow managed to other color itself.

"The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’ – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic. Chromophobia has been a cultural phenomenon since ancient Greek times; this book is concerned with forms of resistance to it. Writers have tended to look no further than the end of the nineteenth century. David Batchelor seeks to go beyond the limits of earlier studies, analysing the motivations behind chromophobia and considering the work of writers and artists who have been prepared to look at colour as a positive value. Exploring a wide range of imagery including Melville’s ‘great white whale’, Huxley’s reflections on mescaline, and Le Corbusier’s ‘Journey to the East’, Batchelor also discusses the use of colour in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art."

I guess these people weren't alive in the 1960s 8-/ The psychedelic era had color everywhere.

Not only color in design, but in people's general appearance. When I look through my highschool yearbook (1977), I'm shocked (shocked I tell you) at how _different_ everyone looked, not from now, but from each otther, then. I'm not just talking about stoners vs jocks, everyone had an individual look based around their overall physical characteristics.

Now, it's mostly Justin Beeber nazi-haircuts, and the ubiquitous "please run me over in the crosswalk" black clothing fashion statement.

In general, people aren't attempting to have an autonomous indivduality, instead everyone (wing-nut and woke-nut alike) are striving to value posture in their chosen identity "community".

How boring...

The ugliness of the contemporary world isn't a result of modernism, but rather neoliberal indifference to beauty.

Nah it's just fashion and materials. Even if you just look at apples product line, you can see they went from colorful plastic to monochrome metal and glass to how reintroducing colors to several of their product lines.

People want so badly for there to be underlying, global conspiracy that they see it everywhere.

Modern design didn’t kill color. It put it on probation. Stripped of aesthetic authority, color now has to justify its existence or get cut. No more freedom to wander or express, it shows up for assigned tasks only: branding, signage, error states, traffic lights.

In the cult of "form follows function," color met the axe. We no longer trust it to create, only to comply. Expressiveness? No. Just signal. Never art. A century after Ornament and Crime, we put color on a PIP. Beauty must be functionalized.

1. https://www2.gwu.edu/~art/Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf