THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020 71
was sympathetic to it. Estimating the
“maximum plausible growth of VS,” they
wrote that as many as a third of all Amer-
icans might be converted to the simple
life by the year 2000.
That didn’t happen. But, in 2008, the
housing crisis and the banking collapse
exposed the fantasy of easy acquisition
as humiliating and destructive; for many
people, it became newly necessary and
desirable to learn to rely on less. It is
tempting to interpret the new minimal-
ism as a kind of cultural aftershock of
that financial disruption, and perhaps
it is, in part. But, at the same time that
Kondo and her cohort have popular-
ized a form of material humility, min-
imalism has become an increasingly as-
pirational and deluxe way of life. The
hashtag #minimalism pulls up more
than seventeen million photos on Insta-
gram; many of the top posts depict high-
end interior spaces. Last April, Kim Kar-
dashian West appeared in a Vogue video
walking through her sixty-million-dol-
lar California mansion, a stark, blank,
monochromatic palace that she described
as a “minimal monastery.” Less is more
attractive when you’ve got a lot of money,
and minimalism is easily transformed
from a philosophy of intentional re-
straint into an aesthetic language through
which to assert a form of walled-off lux-
ury—a self-centered and competitive
impulse that is not so different from the
acquisitive attitude that minimalism
purports to reject.
It is rarely acknowledged, by either
the life-hack-minded authors or the pro-
ponents of minimalist design, that many
people have minimalism forced upon
them by circumstances that render im-
possible a serene, jewel-box life style.
Nor do they mention that poverty and
trauma can make frivolous possessions
seem like a lifeline rather than a burden.
Many of today’s gurus maintain that
minimalism can be useful no matter
one’s income, but the audience they tar-
get is implicitly affluent—the pitch is
never about making do with less because
you have no choice. Millburn and Nico-
demus frequently describe their past lives
as spiritually empty twentysomethings
with six-figure incomes. McKeown
pitches his insights at people who have
a surplus of options as a consequence of
success. Kondo recently launched an on-
line store, suggesting that the left hand
might declutter while the right hand
buys a seventy-five-dollar rose-quartz
tuning fork. Today’s minimalism, with
its focus on self-improvement, feels oddly
dominated by a logic of accumulation.
Less is always more, or “more, more,
more,” as Millburn and Nicodemus write:
“more time, more passion, more experi-
ences, more growth, more contribution,
more contentment—and more freedom.”“
T
he Longing for Less: Living with
Minimalism,” a new book by the
journalist and critic Kyle Chayka, arrives
not as an addition to the minimalist canon
but as a corrective to it. Chayka aims to
find something deeper within the tradi-
tion than an Instagram-friendly aesthetic
and the “saccharine and predigested” ad-
vice of self-help literature. Writing in
search of the things that popular mini-
malism sweeps out of the frame—the
void, transience, messiness, uncertainty—
he surveys minimalist figures in art, music,
and philosophy, searching for a “mini-
malism of ideas rather than things.”
Along the way, he offers sharp cri-
tiques of thing-oriented minimalism.
The sleek, simple devices produced by
Apple, which encourage us to seam-
lessly glide through the day by tapping
and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely
on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,”
Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing
massive amounts of electricity, Chinese
factories where workers die by suicide,
devastated mud pit mines that produce
tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls
in Apple’s headquarters were marked
with Post-it notes to keep employees
from smacking into them, like birds.
Later in the book, Chayka examines
Philip Johnson’s Glass House—a star-
tling, transparent box in New Canaan,
Connecticut—and concludes that its
beauty manifests a “megalomaniacal
possessiveness” over both the surround-
ing landscape and the experience of any-
one who enters. This sort of aestheti-
cized emptiness, Chayka argues, is “not
particularly radical; it might even be
conservative,” given its reliance on con-
trol and exclusion. Plus, the ceiling
leaked when it rained.
More beguiling to Chayka are artists
who have no interest in directing the
lives of others. He writes about Agnes
Martin—who considered herself an Ab-
stract Expressionist but whose poised,transcendent paintings have been claimed
for Minimalism—and Walter De Maria,
whose installation “The New York Earth
Room,” a field of dirt in a mostly empty
white space, has been quietly confound-
ing people in SoHo since 1977. He vis-
its Donald Judd’s “100 Untitled Works
in Mill Aluminum,” in Marfa, Texas,
which defies any attempt to ascribe emo-
tional meaning to it—the aluminum
boxes are “just there,” Chayka writes,
“empty of content except for the sheer
fact of their physical presence, obdurate
and silent, explaining nothing and with
nothing to explain.” Such a sculpture
might sound “deathly boring, more math
problem than artwork,” but, as you walk
through the exhibit, with the desert sun
setting the silvery containers alight, they
become a “constant affirmation of the
simple possibility of sensation.” Else-
where in the book, he writes about the
philosopher Keiji Nishitani, who de-
scribed ikebana, the Japanese art of flower
arranging, as a practice that links beauty
to ephemerality and death.
These are the models for a deeper,
more honest, less self-centered mini-
malism, Chayka believes: a way of liv-
ing that makes “simple things more com-
plicated, not the other way around.” Still,
he is not immune to shallower forms of
the aesthetic. When he flies to Tokyo,
hoping to understand concepts like mono
no aware—the Japanese idea of sensi-
tivity to impermanence—the first thing
he encounters is the stark, white, dehu-
manized Airbnb where he will be stay-
ing. Despite his intent to critique, he is
being catered to, sometimes successfully.
A developer puts up a condo building
across the street from his Brooklyn apart-
ment, and stages one of its units as an
“Instagram-ready tableau of white bed,
white nightstand, white table, white
kitchen cabinets,” visible through big
windows. Chayka admits, grudgingly,
that the place looks stylish.
The Brooklyn apartment and the
Tokyo Airbnb are examples of a style that
Chayka has called AirSpace, a term he
coined in 2016, in a piece for the Verge,
to describe the look of cafés, co-working
spaces, and short-term rental apartments
all over the globe. “I can’t say no to a
tasteful, clean, modern life space,” he wrote
then. “But,” he added, “thinking through
its roots and negative implications makes
me reconsider my attachment.” Chayka’s