In his groundbreaking 1985 essay, "Popular Culture and the Stock Market," Robert Prechter made this observation:
Popular art, fashion and mores are a reflection of the dominant public mood.
Yet how do you know what the "public mood" is? Well, in that same essay Prechter also said,
Both a study of the stock market and a study of trends in popular attitudes support the conclusion that the movement of aggregate stock prices is a direct recording of mood and mood change within the investment community, and by extension, within the society at large.
Indeed, when you look at the stock market as a "sociometer" (as Prechter calls it), you begin to see that major trends in politics, finance, fashion, movies -- and even art -- coincide with major stock market trends.
Social mood trends can and do influence individuals. And because art cannot exist without a creator, it follows that the influence of mood can appear in the works and careers of individual artists.
Consider the work of Pablo Picasso from the perspective of mood. Several of his most famous periods reflect startling symmetry with the prevailing trend in social mood at the time. Read this excerpt regarding Picasso's "Blue Period," from the April 2011 Socionomist study " A Socionomist Sketches Picasso."
Picasso's work falls into six distinct stylistic periods. A cursory look at the first two and perhaps most famous periods, the Blue Period and the Rose Period, shows that they seem to fit stock price trends almost perfectly. In fact, the beginning and ending dates of the first four of Picasso's six major periods -- the Blue through the Cubism Periods -- are near major turning points in the DJIA.
Most historians attribute Picasso's style shifts, including his move into his "Blue Period," to changes in his love life or other outside forces. The Met website, for example, says Picasso's Blue Period was "inspired in part by the suicide of his friend Casagemas." It goes on to note: "Picasso's paintings from late 1901 to about the middle of 1904, referred to as his Blue Period, depict themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair."
But this three-year period seems to be more than simply a response to the death of his friend. Eight months passed between the February 1901 suicide and the Blue Period's October onset.
Figure 1 shows that the Blue Period occurred almost entirely during a negative trend in unconscious social mood as recorded by stock markets.
Prechter has observed that society expresses a heightened interest in magic and the supernatural during such downtrends. John Richardson, Picasso's friend and biographer, says in his documentary film, "Picasso: Magic, Sex, Death," that Picasso became fascinated with the occult iconography of tarot cards during this time, and that the interest influenced one of his most famous Blue Period paintings, La Vie. In the film, Robert Rosenblum, who is an art historian and curator at New York University, offers a remarkably socionomic explanation of the Blue Period:
"One thing I feel has to always be stressed about Picasso's Blue Period is that it is not unique…
"Blue was really the color of the moment, and it was synonymous with the sense of the spiritual, the ethereal … anything that said goodbye to the hard material facts of the 19th century. … There are artists galore who work in a similar tone. So that Picasso's blueness is just part of a general mood -- an effort to join what is spiritual, saintly, melancholic."
What does society look like when "Norms are normal no more"?