>>455821
>examining trends
True, but defining trends involves an element of time that often has little relevance until much, much later when they can be viewed and sorted out from a historical perspective. Even at that point, any timeline you establish may have almost nothing to do with how those trends coalesced into any particular style or aesthetic, and impart little to no valuable information as to how that happened.

But what CARI and its followers do is hyper-focused on time frames, often while by their own admission a particular trend is still current. Then they reference other allegedly concise and compartmentalized trends as being related but again it's with so little historical distance and perspective that it's meaningless.

>common influences

This certainly helps to understand how styles develop, but rather than being a timeline or a tree where X movement branches off into later derivatives, the development of artistic styles and movements is more like a thread map where threads connecting more contemporary trends that may have little in common visually lead back to the same ancient influences, while contemporaneous styles/movements may have little connection at all.

Case in point- both chair designs in picrel are made by designers commonly associated with Art Nouveau but despite being made during its hetday almost none of the visual elements are anything like the ones used to describe Art Nouveau.

But if you consider the overarching influence and gestalt of the Arts and Crafts Movement and Modernism in its original sense and the allegedly separate aesthetics of the various trends spawned by those movements over the course of a half century or more, then it all fits even though those chairs may not look like it.

tl; dr: Meaningful categorization of artistic syles is not all about, or even mostly about looks or trends or time periods

If that seems impossible to you, you need to study more until it seeps in.

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Why shouldn't design trends/styles be classified based on shared visual characteristics?