You've got your goals wrong. Painting might be about expression and feeling. (Don't want to go down that path.) Design is definitely about clarity and function

You've got your goals wrong. Painting might be about expression and feeling. (Don't want to go down that path.) Design is definitely about clarity and function AND expression and feeling. All of the major brands that you give money to every day have spent LOTS of time on expression and feeling to convey the right messages to their consumers. Try telling Apple that design has nothing to do with feeling. And yeah, like the others have said, there was no pure black or pure white (at least as pure as the screen provides) during those several hundred years of amazing printing.