I reckon the missing objectivity you allude to is important for academics and art historians. However, Ad-hoc or informal grouping/labeling/critique of abstract visual concepts is really important for serious visual work, and definitely one of the fun parts. These are the sorts of groupings and terms I use when engaging with other artists, designers, art directors, etc. What we're trying to communicate resists verbal description because it is often complexly visceral and emotional with too many important details to single out visually let alone enumerate verbally, and it's all dependent on cultural context. Being able to take hunks of visual culture and conceptually manipulate them is central to our professional funtion.
My reasoning as a developer is like building with Legos, and when I'm doing visual work, it's like sculpting with clay.
Totally. As a musician we do this all of the time. Just last week a group of friends and I were chuckling at a very specific flavor of folksy pop that dominated in the early 2010's that we jokingly refer to as "stomp clap hey".
The term "stomp clap hey" is a little bit derisive and by quantifying it in this way it probably becomes a target for people to mock (see: the "karen" phenomena), but it perfectly encapsulates the tenor of this particular trend and is instantly graspable by anyone steeped in contemporary music. It has it's uses.
Yeah— even as a non-musician who has to deal with music in a media production/directing capacity, I immediately knew what you meant. Someone who doesn't interrogate musical aesthetic deliberately might assume it encapsulated instrumentation, composition, and maybe artists or something definable like that, but it encompasses so much more than that— then-current trends in recording and production, cultural context, how it was intended to make people feel and then maybe how it really did make people feel, etc etc etc. WAY more things than you'd want to enumerate individually. Like I said, I'm not a musician, but as an art director, if I asked for a "twee ding dong ukulele whistle" song that builds energy into a "2012 bank-commercial stomp clap hey" bridge, which then turns into a weird al version of itself for comedic impact, you'd know what I was looking for enough to bring to an initial meeting.
My reasoning as a developer is like building with Legos, and when I'm doing visual work, it's like sculpting with clay.