What comes after post-minimalism?

Nothingness?

Not according to the National Gallery.

Earlier this fall during a conference in Washington DC I took an afternoon away from bioethics panels to explore the National Gallery's east building. Naturally, I was struck by many art-related things, but this struck me as a rhetorician who never entirely stops thinking about the meaning of words:


Post-minimal?

It reminds me of when I first learned the term "post modern." I thought it sounded ridiculous (in part because I didn't yet know that "modernism" describes a period that is over; I thought "modern" just mean "recent and now"). To my non-art-trained mind, post-minimal is equally silly. If you are going in the direction of making things less, then the most less you can get to is none.

Here's what it actually means in the art world:


I see a set of double doors on the left, and a pair of phone jacks on the right.

What do you see?

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