The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism

by Kyle Chayka

As the architect Pier Vittorio Aureli writes, the “less is more” attitude can be a form of capitalist exploitation, encouraging workers to produce more while getting by with less, creating more profit for their bosses at the cost of their own quality of life.

There’s a kind of ecstasy to the clarity of well-ordered space, a feeling that I also get from well-proportioned floorboards or a full parking lot: Life’s structurelessness is briefly banished.

The white cube also informs the popular minimalism of the twenty-first century. Today, blank interiors simultaneously deny and reinforce consumerism.

we crave silence because we are disappointed. We are disappointed because man-made noise, language, and art have proved themselves fruitless, if not outright oppressive.

Minimalism can often lead to a stultifying sameness as everything becomes as simple as possible—the elegant, ambient, blank style that I’ve described. It whitewashes both literally and metaphorically, at times privileging the Westernized, sanitized versions of external influences while deemphasizing their origins. Minimalism’s sources get rebranded as high-minded art made by solo geniuses instead of the products of a globalized culture, even if the artists themselves readily acknowledged their debts.

the minimalist attitude is susceptible to corruption. The desire that everything be just right, matched with everything else around it in a unified whole, leads easily to intolerance.