Excellent question. The problem with the calarts aesthetic, apart from the usual critique that it’s a lazy, easily recyclable style that denotes a certain mindless kid-friendly Immaturity, is that it’s an extension of all that is wrong with flat design.
1. It’s color-sense... https://twitter.com/california_tory/status/1248117458700865536

There simply no depth or areal perspective, no focal points that have a nuance of warmth to cool backgrounds. There no nuance to any shading and shadows, it’s all hard edge on hard edge of gaudy pastel “camp” like colors, flash animation and procreate presettings vomit.

Hence why it’s considered flat design. The colors are an extension of ahh, certain modernist ideologies for a reason, they do not evoke depth but sameness and kitschy blasts of shiny monotone color blocks, not even good enough for fauvism.

2. The bodies themselves are hideous, lack any proportion and would seem silly if it weren’t for every cartoon and “grammable” soft girl post-tumblr digital “artist” doing the same thing.
Why are the bodies bad? It’s not just because they are round, it’s because the artists

Themselves often buy digital tools without first actually doing serious life drawing like better manga artists or the OG animators. They don’t care to use traditional media either, so their work is all clean, slick, and too similar to everything else.

Which one is more appealing between the two? They are both cartoonish exaggerations, but courage has a verve to it the Steven universe abomination will never have.

3. CALARTS is the aesthetic of the posthuman and the end of history. There’s no connection to a futurist imagination nor a sense of history cemented in modern art. Better artists actually pay heed to modern/contemporary art, visionaries like mobius could actually cross over into

Fine arts, and it would still be something with narrative. With calarts there’s not even a sense that there is the usual tropes of modern art figures like that of Miro, Braque or George condo, it’s just to push out culture industry crap where good art is the last thing in mind.

Take these cartoonish Condo pieces, there is depth, motion, hideousness, an ironic sense of appropriating the cartoon into fine art. Animators have done the inverse, fine art becomes the cartoon. Calarts is neither, it has no vision or even irony. Hence why the people who love it

Tend to depict characters with the same annoying, vulgar, childish and low brow personality, as well as a snarky type of arrogance and smugness to them masquerading as empowerment and righteousness. Calarts insta artists is an aesthetic extension of people who think Harry Potter

And the marvel universe are western canon. There no mythos or even pathos, there’s just garishly coloured blobs acting out the neurotic complexes of the artists themselves.

Only the modern world and late capitalism could produce this: