critical practice week 1

Critical Practice

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Dunhuang Chen

Generally, I disagree with Andersen’s argument from my own perspective. We all have been through dramatic changes of every social aspect such as arts, technology, climate, globe geopolitics, economies etc. You will realize how huge this world has been changed since last two decade if you watch news every single day.  His article points out that our cultures of innovation and cultural aesthetics is a stagnation. Like what he said, late 20 years our art style is no longer innovated and artists just mimic previous styles but never come up with creative ideas.

For me I less care about what happened to fine arts, especially I cannot understand the abstract art because I was to be a entertainment artists, is dreaming about creating products for Sci-Fi films or video games etc. I could fairly say that the entertainment arts’ style has been changed tremendously. Think about star wars episode 1 during the 1970s, people have never seen somethings like space fight before and they were shocked by those giant imperial spaceship and death stars. No one deny that most of designs in old star wars was quite faddish and marvelous. Actually, in addition to Sci-Fi movies in 1960s, the entire fashion, car designs and architectures were refer to space shapes because the people has entered the “ space time” during that period. Most of designs were with the tear drop ship and “ wings” such as “ alien” juicer and transportation designed by Luiqi Colani.

The “innovation” does not necessarily means creating new art style or visual effects that we have never produced before, but means creating somethings we have never realized before. For example, nowadays people are more suitable with “21s century” artistic styles than 20s, the art style in Sci-Fi movies like ( District 9, Elysium, Pacific Rim, Gravity, Transformer, GI Joe, etc) are obviously more realistic and convincing, reasonable and rational. People would like to see more real structures behind those fancy designs. So the old art style looks childish, ridiculous cheap because they lack of real industrial structures and textures. So in 1970s the audience confirmed that the designs in film was very neoteric when they have seen them first time. However, I just saw the latest star wars: Rogue One and I realized how huge improvements has been made there. Not only the incredible visual effect but also the design style is much better than previous. Similarly, the designs in the movie “Prometheus” is further more better than old “Alien” movies. I consider this as an innovation,

Further more, every artistic event is just a reflection of social development. The booming of economy and industrial revolution, religious reform, science change the world from century to century. In the 20s, every social aspects was fiercely changing due to stimulation by world war and arms race. The quantum physics and rocket science prompts the third industrial revolution. Therefore unsurprisingly we have witnessed amazing leaps of innovation of art, fashion, science every 20 years until late 20th. However unfortunately, we are facing countless issues like global warming, air pollution, race, terrorism. The rate of development of world’s economy is slowing down by those obstacle, the art style does not change too much as a society’ reflection seemingly. Actually, the invention of internet started a new revolution for people all over the world, they could express their own art style through internet. Like what postmodernism point out: every one is the artist. That is a biggest innovation. Besides social development, the market determines what kind of products we need. People still love old dramas, poem, impressionism, and being mimic old art styles. But does not means that we are trapped in a dead circle and people lost the spirit of innovation at all. Sometimes, returning to the ancients is the best innovation.