Naming, of course, is hardly new. Artistic movements have long used labels to establish affiliation. When movements name themselves, the name can be seen as another part of their practice. Dadaism is said to have been named when artist Richard Huelsenbeck stabbed a dictionary and landed on the French word dada (meaning “hobby horse”) – a process that itself embodies Dada’s embrace of chance and rejection of fixed meaning. For movements like De Stijl, surrealism, and Fluxus, the act of naming themselves was inseparable from their broader writing and publishing practices. The same names appeared as titles of journals, manifestos, and exhibitions, helping consolidate the movements’ philosophies into coherent public identities.
In cases where naming wasn’t self-reflexive, names historically arrived via critics, historians, and institutions. Fauvism, for example, began as an insult. After visiting the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, critic Louis Vauxcelles described paintings by Henri Matisse and André Derain, which were hung beside classical-style sculptures, as “Donatello parmi les fauves,” or “Donatello among the wild beasts,” casting the newer work as excessive and monstrous in contrast to academic tradition. In the absence of a self-determined label, Vauxcelles’ sarcastic remark filled the vacuum; les fauves (the wild beasts), became the movement’s name. The label art deco emerged through a similarly top-down process: what we now understand as a coherent style was originally a much looser set of tendencies circulating under broader terms like style moderne or style contemporain. It was only later, largely through a 1968 book by historian Bevis Hillier, that these strands were consolidated under the single category of art deco.
The power of labelling becomes clearer when you look at what happens to the periods and movements that never received one. Evan Collins, one of the co-founders of The Consumer Aesthetic Research Institute (Cari), a collective documenting design trends in corporate and consumer worlds, notes that after popularising art deco as the defining label for the decorative arts of the 1920s and 30s, historian Bevis Hillier published another book in 1975 on the decorative arts of the 1940s and 50s under the title Austerity Binge. The fact that you likely recognise art deco but not austerity/binge is evidence that only one of these labels successfully entered common circulation. Today, even people with little knowledge of design history can usually conjure a relatively coherent image of art deco (geometric ornament, thin linework, and basically everything else you’d find in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby) while the aesthetics of the following decades remain far less consolidated in public memory despite being no less visually distinct at the time.
