Americans are drowning in stuff. While U.S. houses have more than doubled in size over the past 50 years, 25% of people with two-car garages don’t have room enough in them to park their vehicles. It’s no wonder the tidying-up maven Marie Kondo has won legions of devotees, all anxious to purge their clutter.
Kyle Chayka, author of “The Longing for Less,” starts his meditation on minimalism by looking at why the advice of organizing “experts” like Ms. Kondo resonate for so many people. His initial reaction was that the urge to reduce one’s footprint wasn’t necessarily “a voluntary personal choice,” he writes, “but an inevitable societal and cultural shift responding to the experience of living through the 2000s. Up through the twentieth century, material accumulation and stability made sense as forms of security. If you owned your home and your land, no one could take it away from you.” With the spike in real-estate prices, the threat of job automation and the dangers of global warming, some people went from accumulation to reduction as a way of regaining control.
Mr. Chayka comes to believe that this is an oversimplification. The images, moreover, of spare modern interiors as featured in magazines and real-estate ads seem more elitist than accessible. To find a richer, more nuanced explanation for the appeal of today’s minimalist aesthetic, Mr. Chayka looks to past practitioners of capital-M Minimalism—artists such as Donald Judd, composers such as John Cage and the architect Philip Johnson, among others. By examining their lifestyles and work, the author hopes to show that ideas can coexist alongside aesthetics as a way of “confronting the world without resorting to . . . the superficial version of minimalism.”
