International photobank Depositphotos has published a forecast of visual trends for the next year. We were interested in this review primarily because it illustrates an important and already undisputed truth: painting, architecture, curatorial projects, design, popular culture, ideas of video bloggers and retailers, and even more so installations and computer games in the XXI century create a common visual culture, a common set of themes, ideas, styles.
The project “Visual Trends – 2020: the future is near” sets the vector of movement and development primarily for photographers, designers, visual communications specialists. And even if you are not connected to any of these professions, you will be interested to know what visual content will accompany you next year in social networks, in commercials, on-street boards, in museums. Everywhere, in a word. And what do Mona Lisa, Kandinsky, and architectural brutalism have to do with it?
Augmented Reality
This trend in Depositphotos’ review takes the first place, not for nothing. Virtual reality the further it goes, the more it will affect all spheres of human life: recreation, work, entertainment. And if you follow the news of the world’s best art museums and the most anticipated exhibitions, then, of course, you know that the augmented (or “augmented”) reality for curators becomes one of the most powerful tools for organizing an important museum event.
The Louvre used the latest technology to allow visitors to see a 3D model of the Mona Lisa. Specialists studied the perspective, landscape behind Mona Lisa’s back, textures and folds on her clothes to recreate a three-dimensional model of the heroine herself and the space around her. In a specially equipped room of the Louvre, you can spend 7 minutes alone with Gioconda.
For the retrospective of Amedeo Modigliani in London’s Tate Gallery in 3D was recreated Paris artist’s studio, where an unquenchable cigarette smokes, wind plays with sheets of paper, the cloth falls from a recently finished canvas, sunlight plays on the floor.
Studio Modigliani recreated in virtual reality for an exhibition in the Tate Modern Gallery. Photo: www.tate.org.uk.Finally, two years ago, the first full virtual museum opened. In the personal collection of Dutchman George Kremer – 70 paintings by Flemish and Dutch artists of the XVII century. At first, he was going to build a museum and make the collection available to the public but then decided that even more people around the world will be able to enjoy the paintings if you have to pay only $ 10 and wear VR-glasses. For the virtual Kremer Museum was created a special architectural project, installed the optimal lighting. Paintings can be viewed very closely, look at the backside of the canvas and listen to the tour, which leads Kremer himself.
In short, the world’s best museums not only use the latest technology in curatorial projects. They are the generators and promoters of ideas that will come to the fore in visual communications next year. The most optimistic prophets from the IT world predict an ideal future, in which each museum will have its own virtual space – as an alternative to a live museum. And in a couple of years, we’ll be able to walk through the virtual museum of Orsay or MET in the evenings, spin the light if it’s bright, and drink tea in our kitchen between halls.
Dangers of technological progress
Admit it, you got a little scared from a previous prophecy. That’s right. This is exactly the next visual trend: the availability of technology and the dangers it entails. Technology is changing a lot: the way we watch exhibitions, the way artists and individual works become known and sold, and finally, the way art is created. And although, for example, the first experience of selling at Christie’s auction a work created by artificial intelligence was unexpectedly successful (the painting was planned to be sold for 10 thousand dollars, and sold for more than 432 thousand), programmed masterpieces still somehow have not captured the art market. So it’s too early to sound the alarm.
The confrontation and dialogue between the artist and technology – the story is not new. At each new turn of development, it is repeated. Perhaps that is why the futuristic visual trends in the list for 2020 are followed by several reflections on the artistic experience of the past.
Bauhaus: back to the future
The interest in Bauhaus aesthetics in the outgoing year of 2019 was certainly heated by the grand celebration of the school’s centennial. Throughout the year, art exhibitions were held on both sides of the ocean, Oscar Schlemmer’s theatrical productions were revived, films were screened in cinemas, books by the Bauhaus chief theorists were published by a landmark date and iconic buildings were restored, even food stylists put food on plates, inspired by Kandinsky and Gropius. The Bauhaus’ passion for geometry, minimalism, basic colors, and innovative typography proved to be unexpectedly relevant and convincing in design.
The Bauhaus turned out to be the necessary step backward for adjusting the visual compasses of modernity: exactly one hundred years ago Walter Gropius, the founder of the Higher School of Construction and Artistic Design, laid the foundation for modern design; exactly one hundred years ago the building of the school itself, the teachers’ houses and the Haus am Horn exhibition house changed the concept of architecture. The Bauhaus was the first art school in Germany to admit more girls than boys in its first year. For the first time, it was within the walls of this school that students not only developed designs and projects but also made dishes, lighting systems and textiles themselves in their workshops.
The experience of the Bauhaus in 2020 will be useful not only as a visual inspiration and a source of precise minimalist solutions but also as an example of the most daring and radical synthesis of the latest technology and art in art history.
But the strict perfection and conciseness of the Bauhaus in the coming year will not be the only way to solve today’s visual challenges through a journey into the past.
Brutalism: a challenge to boring perfection
Brutalism is one of the most controversial styles in architecture, an interest in which has suddenly increased in recent years. Above all, thanks to the cinema and Instagram. Do you remember the impressive play of light and shadow on the rough gray surface of the city’s multi-story buildings, which suddenly hit the lenses of professional photographers and bloggers? And the mighty, pressing concrete setting- “Blade Runner 2049”? Cameraman Roger Dickins, who won an Oscar for his work on this film, said in an interview that Denis Vilnev when setting the task of the film crew said: “…I want a sense of brutalism, the hard concrete architecture that originated in the 1950s.”
Brutalism has an ambiguous reputation: on the one hand, it is stuck in the dominance of faceless typical high-rise buildings, and even the heyday of crime, which such dreary concrete blocks provoked, on the other hand – in the postwar period, it is concrete high-rise solved the problem of affordable housing. Perhaps not a single direction in architecture has been so seriously tested: such mass replication, simplification, depreciation.
The term “brutalism” was coined by British architects Alison and Peter Smithson’s, but it comes from the technique of “béton brut” (raw concrete), which was used by the prophet of brutalism architect Le Corbusier. And his plans, of course, was not to provide armed gangs and drug dealers in London, Marseille or Paris with inspiring scenery. Le Corbusier came up with the idea of building houses on concrete supports, freeing the walls of the bearing function, and thus diversify the layout, he invented external concrete blinds, which saved from the scorching heat, and on the roofs of houses stood treadmills, stages, and terraces. Le Corbusier planted parks on the rooftops of the houses so that people in the big cities could finally begin to breathe. He lived in one of these apartments for 30 years.