“Last June I shared a cab with Grayson Perry, one of Britain’s best-known artists. He had just returned from the Basel art fair, where he had been struck by something. “Everything is now happening all at once,” he told me with a roll of the eyes. There was 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. The late 20th and early 21st centuries were peculiarly receptive to its poetics of purity—in architecture, in art, in food, in design. This autumn it receives what might be either its coronation or its obituary. “Plain Space” is the title of both an exhibition at the Design Museum in London, and a book by its subject, John Pawson—the elegant Old Etonian architect who, more than anyone, turned a cerebral art-world cult into a deluxe style for the stratum of society where fastidious aestheticism meets high net worth.”

via DOES MINIMALISM MATTER? | More Intelligent Life.