My knee-jerk reaction to this article was pretty negative, but that's because the initial example (the paintings) is pretty bad. This experiment was made in the

My knee-jerk reaction to this article was pretty negative, but that's because the initial example (the paintings) is pretty bad. This experiment was made in the worst possible way: the same two artists rendering their interpretation of what different people say they want, and the paintings are unsurprisingly similar: the same bluish sky, the same tree to the right, the same mountain to the left. As an example, it's terrible and unscientific: it's pretty much a statement on these two painters, and not much else. It's impossible, for example, that every person interviewed wanted a tree to the right of the painting -- that's just what the artists themselves preferred. It's also questionable whether people actually want what they claim to want in an interview. That said, it's hard to deny the other examples are spot on. I suspect they are cherry picked (surely you can find celebrities that do NOT look like those in the example), but I find these samey blandness everywhere. It's on the "Netflix look", it's on book covers, it's on how malls and supermarkets look, etc.