The Aesthetic Attention Span, or How long before we need the New?

Life moves in cycles; optimally, these are spirals, we return to where we were but one notch higher up. We learn, we understand, we evolve. Sometimes, however, the cycle spins downwards. History, a series of events that have a tangible effect on our lives, moves erratically, but does tend to echo, repeat, rhyme. Anacyclosis. What goes round comes around.

But the aesthetics of our times? Architecture, design, fashion, literature, music, cars, graphics – yes, things change, the quest for novelty and innovation is limitless and it shapes the spirit of our age, the zeitgeist. 

We tend to label the look-and-feel of our built environment, our surroundings, by decades, book-ending them conveniently. In my mind's eye I can scroll through my memories of Britain from the early 1960s, still emerging from postwar austerity, drab colours and clothes, through to the mid 1980s in distinct phases defined by music, clothes, car designs, high-street logos, typefaces and indeed colours. And then, around around the mid-1990s, aesthetic change starts to become change for change's sake, not for the sake of modernity. Form and function, that sort of thing.

Look at a car from the 1920s, and compare it to one from the 1950s. An infant could tell you which looks more modern. But look at a car from the mid-1990s and compare it to something off the production line today... Does it really look more modern, or just different?

Below: thirty years of automotive design progress, 1925 to 1955.

Below: thirty years of automotive design progress, 1995 to 2025.

If I were to have my pick of the above four, I'd go for the 1955 Oldsmobile. And stay with it until the end of my life. Because I like its looks more than the more recent designs. One reason why the automotive industry has failed to prise any money out of my bank account over the past quarter century has been its inability to design a car I'd actually like. The crumpled-tin look turns me off. Just look at the grotesque 'face' of the current Toyota Whatsit (above right). It looks like a whale feeding on krill.

Music, clothes, typography – has that much changed since 1995? The technology obviously is quite different, as is the political vibe. But visually, aurally, aesthetically, 1995 is far closer to today than 1955 was to 1925. Aesthetic change for the sake of aesthetic change – built-in obsolescence – is a driver of economic growth; a wasteful one at that. How can you possibly be seen to be driving a 1959 Cadillac in 1962, by which time the fins had shrunk and men wore pleatless slim-line pants and pork-pie hats rather than broad-brimmed trilbies and trousers featuring acres of pleated cloth. Just a few years, and what a difference. From Humphrey Bogart to Steve McQueen. Cool change. But what's changed in men's fashions since the mid-1990s?

One of the first films I watched on my own in the cinema (and the first film I bought on DVD) was American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973). A film that wallows in nostalgia – the music, the fashion, the trends, the cars – from an era just ten years before it was shot. Do you feel nostalgic about 2015? I could name you a hundred songs from 1975, for example, but not one from 2015. Did we wear different clothes in 2015? Did people go around with different hairstyles?

Access to the tools of design was once hard-won; a draughtsman's drawing board and all the instruments needed to turn a concept into a sketch into plans for a working prototype. Today, software makes possible professional-level design to anyone who has a desire and a knack to do so. The same with music, with movie-making, with any form of creative endeavour. The barriers of entry have fallen. Great, you may say. More democratic. No more closed shops. Everyone can now create. But what's happened is that the long tail has stretched out towards infinity. A handful of titans dominate each industry at one end, while a vast number of creative people struggle for a handful of page views at the other end. Our blockbuster movies tend to be remakes or franchises, nothing new is breaking out of the underground. Yet surely somewhere in that long tail is a talent or talents that could launch an aesthetic movement to equal Art Nouveau or Art Deco, the New Look or Rock'n'Roll. But it's all too fragmented. That talent needs to be planted in a soil, in a social milieu, aesthetic change does not occur in a vacuum.

While I feel that humanity is indeed in a historical inflexion point, that seismic geopolitical and socio-economic change is afoot, I can't say the same about the arts and culture. Our attention spans, shortening year by year, flick to the default – "I'll stick to what I like". Kitten videos.

The Shock of the New? There are enough shocks out there already, thank you, without introducing any aesthetic shocks.

It will be interesting to return to this post in ten, twenty and thirty years' time. Is an aesthetic revolution around the corner? Or have we emerged out of a particularly creative period in human history, and now have nothing more than algorithm-generated mediocrity to look forward to?

This time two years ago:
Wałbrzych, Książ and Riese

This time ten years ago:
Something new in the skies over Okęcie

This time 11 years ago:
How the other half lives - a Radomite's tale

This time 12 years ago:
On guard against complacency

This time 13 years ago:
Ready but not open - footbridge over Puławska

This time 14 years ago:
Dusk along the Vistula

This time 15 years ago:
Mediterranean Kraków

This time 15 years ago:
Around Wisełka, Most Łazienkowski, Wilanowska by night

This time 16 years ago:
Summer storms

This time 18 years ago:
Golden time of day