minimalism | The Smart Set

Reimagining Excess

Matt Hanson — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 15:22:02 +0000

“All Things Are Too Small” declares the title, borrowed from a 13th-century Dutch mystic, of the new collection of essays by Becca Rothfeld, one of the most prolific and versatile critics working today. The claim initially confused me. Too small? Casting a weary glance at the way we live now — visual excess blaring from […]

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From Paris to Nowhere

Claire Polders — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 12:30:00 +0000

Paris, C’est Cher! For 18 years, I lived with my (now) husband in a charming old artist atelier in the 6th arrondissement in Paris. My home was a short daily walk from the Jardin du Luxembourg with its spring blossoms and fall foliage, and lay in the shadow of the Tour Montparnasse, where I not […]

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Art/Not

Morgan Meis — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 21:50:01 +0000

Hilton Kramer, longtime chief art critic for the New York Times, was never a shy man, at least in print. He thought of art criticism as a battle. There was a war, as Kramer saw it, between good art and bad art or – maybe more crucially – between art and non-art. Kramer saw himself […]

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You Can Take It with You

Stefany Anne Golberg — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:12:43 +0000

Everywhere you travel, there are backpackers. You can see them herding at train platforms in Italy, or wandering past dusty tea stalls in India. They always have that look: something between yearning and exhaustion. It’s been more than half a century now that backpacking, for many young Americans, has become a rite of passage, […]

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Movin’ on Down

Greg Beato — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:12:43 +0000

In the same way that America’s fast food purveyors pack their menus with cheap, empty calories, the country’s home builders pack their houses with cheap, empty space. On a cost-per-square-foot basis, the typical McMansion may seem like a good deal — but like a Big Mac, what sort of nourishment does it truly deliver? Gorge […]

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Housing Authority

Morgan Meis — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:12:43 +0000

The houses are all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same. Dan Graham started photographing them in 1965. It was New Jersey. They were photographs of suburban homes and tract housing. The excitement of postwar consumerism had faded by then. A new wave of melancholy was settling on the American mood. […]

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Style Mavens

Morgan Meis — Mon, 11 May 2009 16:12:43 +0000

Omit needless words! That’s what you’d have if you reduced the 105 pages of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style — which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year — to three words. The idea is that fewer words leads to clarity. Clearness and brevity go together, as do confusion and […]

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