The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism

by Kyle Chayka

Brooklyn was filled with faux-lumberjacks drinking out of mason jars. Conspicuous consumption, the ostentation of the previous decades, wasn’t just distasteful, it was unreachable.

As Kathryn Schulz wrote in a scathing New Yorker takedown, Thoreau was “narcissistic, fanatical about self-control,7 adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world.”

Still, there remains this sense that true austerity has to be imported from somewhere else.

The iPhone’s function depends on an enormous, complex, ugly superstructure of satellites and undersea cables that certainly aren’t designed in pristine whiteness.

The architecture itself is exhibitionist, framing whatever happens within it like the subject of a painting.

The house’s transparency had a way of concealing as much as it revealed.

(“Sex is best in a cocoon,” Johnson quipped.)

(The problem with being both a critic and an artist is that you’ll probably like work that resembles yours.)

Interesting in this case meant offering a unique, instantaneous aesthetic experience.

In his 1967 Artforum essay “Art and Objecthood” Michael Fried wrote that the group’s work “is inexhaustible … because there is nothing there to exhaust.”

Less can be more, as long as you have more of the less part.

tragic paradox of writing: You can’t do it, but you also can’t not.

Art becomes retail surprisingly quickly.

I had a sudden urge for some unexpected messiness to break the spell of the sour music, like sneaking out to one of the Guggenheim’s circular bathrooms to smoke a cigarette or have sex.

“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting,” Cage wrote.

The most popular avant-gardists are always savvy marketers as well as iconoclasts.

He no longer used a piano to compose because he didn’t have access to one; the music was all in his head, and anyway, a piano was just a kind of calculator.

Contingency might be fate or it might be nihilism: Life’s arbitrariness is either meaningful or meaningless.

“The logical outcome of fascism20 is an aestheticizing of political life,” Walter Benjamin, a German Jew, wrote in 1936. “All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war.”