Join me in a rant against the “minimalist aesthetic”.
When we were decorating our first apartment, my wife and I sought the help of a professional indoor architect. We declared ourselves minimalists and proceeded to list many, many, many minimalist items we would like to have in said apartment. We never got that secret room behind the cupboard.
We love our apartment, but all the things we actually enjoy are not minimalist at all – the chicken on the wall, or the rainbow strip with 900+ LEDs.
Now, we are preparing to build a house together, we don’t consider ourselves minimalists anymore. Furthermore, we feel cheated into pretending to be ones.
Minimalism as an overreaction to consumerism
As our parents and grandparents enjoyed the spoils of capitalism, industrial production, and the most prosperous period in human history, they had to learn how to deal with the world of abundance. Everybody could have bought anything. So they did.
Gadgets, clothes, and home decor in every conceivable flavor became affordable faster than good taste, and responsible consumer behaviors managed to catch up. Our homes became cluttered messes of stuff fast. We needed a solution.
Enter “minimalism.”
The textbook minimalism can be understood as making do with bare necessities. Buy only what you really need, and use what you have.
Marie Kondo, the guru of minimalism, has a useful “does it spark joy” heuristic:
In the KonMari Method™, your feelings are the standard for decision-making – specifically, knowing what sparks joy. To determine this when tidying, the key is to pick up each object one at a time, and ask yourself quietly, “Does this spark joy?” Pay attention to how your body responds. Joy is personal, so everyone will experience it differently; Marie describes it as “…a little thrill, as if the cells in your body are slowly rising.”
Through the process of selecting only those things that inspire joy, you can identify precisely what you love – and what you need.
The concept is not new. William Morriss, of the “Arts and crafts” movement born in the 1800s in opposition to industrial production, expressed this as:
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
I shared a few wallpapers produced by William Morriss in a previous issue.
Enter “contractor gray”.
So far, the ideas make sense: buy only things I care about and decorate my home only with aesthetics that I really love.
No excess, no showing off, only timeless beauty and joy.
And we get:
Does this spark joy? Is it beautiful?
The gray-white look is sold as “clean”, “modern”, and the best antidote to visual clutter and the aggressive decor of your grandma.
When we try to look under the “clean and modern” non-descriptors, we really cannot find anything more substantial. It’s because that look is all about absence.
It’s about avoiding cringe, commitment to any particular style, and not risking ridicule.
It is not a style, but the absence of style, and in particular – avoiding choices, avoiding developing your own taste, and avoiding putting effort into your environment.
It is the highest expression of treating your surroundings as a commodity – essentially something that you will not care about.
So…. how does it spark joy?
The things that truly spark joy are being used, cared about, and improved over time. You cannot buy a lovely home straight from the catalog.
Do not be tricked into believing that modern decor must be slick or psychedelic, or “natural” or “modem art,” or “plants” or anything else that current taste-makers claim. It is most beautiful when it comes straight from your life—the things you care for, the things that tell your story.
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But the irony is, that the visitors who come into a room don’t want this nonsense any more than the people who live there. It is far more fascinating to come into a room which is the living expression of a person, or a group of people, so that you can see their lives, their histories, their inclinations, displayed in manifest form around the walls, in the furniture, on the shelves.
-Christopher Alexander, “A pattern language” considered the bible of architecture.
“minimalism” is the highest expression of mass production
I am using “minimalism” in apostrophes because the idea of genuinely caring about a few things got coopted into a philosophy of removing everything worth caring about.
It is easier to mass-produce, sell, and market an “aesthetic” that raises no objections, because it is supposedly for everybody, in every context, from any material.
The intellectual roots of Minimalism lie in cubism, purism, and constructivism – finding the one purpose, the true soul of an item, and exaggerating it. But the reality of “minimalism” is about selling more crap that can be produced more cheaply.
People need affordable, mass-produced homes. Not every place needs to be cared for, and not everybody has time to work on turning their home into an expression of a unique taste.
We should aspire to have some places that spark joy, are worth caring for, and are built with style. “minimalism“ is not that style.
A few things I’ve read
The age of average
“minimalism” is only a symptom of a larger issue. In a fantastic deep dive, Alex Murrell shows how cars, landscapes, brands, interiors, people, and media are all getting similar. Fast Company has coined the term the “blanding”:
The worst branding trend (…) is the one you probably never noticed. I call it blanding. The main offenders are in tech, where a new army of clones wears a uniform of brand camouflage. The formula is sort of a brand paint-by-numbers. Start with a made-up-word name. Put it in a sans-serif typeface. Make it clean and readable, with just the right amount of white space. Use a direct tone of voice. Nope, no need for a logo. Maybe throw in some cheerful illustrations. Just don’t forget the vibrant colors. Bonus points for purple and turquoise. Blah blah blah.
So, this is your call to arms. Whether you’re in film or fashion, media or marketing, architecture, automotive or advertising, it doesn’t matter. Our visual culture is flatlining and the only cure is creativity
Buy things, not experiences
In another pushback against “minimalism”, Harold Lee points out how the glorification of “minimalism” is very self-serving:
The advocates of the new minimalism are, by and large, urban dwellers, tied to stratospheric real estate markets in prime locations
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So “buy experiences, not things” is less a bold new philosophy than a mere rationalization of life choices that people have already been forced to adopt
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There are experience-like things; like a basement carpentry workshop or a fine collection of loose-leaf tea. And there are thing-like experiences, like an Instagrammable vacation that collects a bunch of likes but soon fades from memory
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