Minimalism Is Dead
“It has been the defining style of our era, but now it’s in retreat. Intelligent Life’s Stephen Bayley works out whether less will soon be no more.”
“There is no longer a ruling style or taste, no common agreement on what is avant-garde and what is retrograde. Today the happening thing is just what is happening. We have reached the end of ‘isms’. Minimalism was the last, and most curious, ism of all. … In one sense, minimalism had a beginning and end as (nearly) precise as the beginning and end of, say, baroque or pre-Raphaelitism. German architects first used the term ‘Existenzminimum’—referring to low-cost social housing—in the mid-1920s. The term ‘minimal art’ first appeared circa 1965. Journalists writing about interior design began mentioning minimalism in the mid-1980s.”
