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Second time in last... maybe 2 months that I missed (glass) doors and smashed my head against a glass wall... at the same place as last time. Thank Barlow, no one noticed... again.
 
MrKnickerbocker said:
I've never been able to stomach Hemingway's minimalist style.
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I see your point. Not much of a minimalism fan myself as I feel like it's a lazy way of art. If you want to be a mirror of realities in the world and get rid of "plastic elements", realism and expressionism are far better styles. But I do like For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea by him.
 
Minimalism is not lazy. It takes a lot of skill and thought to keep your style at that level and still manage to get all the intensity of the experience across.

That's not strictly aimed at you, Flash, it's just a general observation.
 
That would be my argument in defense of realism and expressionism. I don't see much "intensity of the experience" in minimalism.
 
Achieving a minimalist writing style is hard work, and most people never manage to. It takes more effort to think of a few striking words in which to say something than to babble on about it infinitely. If you think of it as 'lazy' then, I'm sorry, you do not know what you are talking about.
 
I like simplicity and I'm aware of its importance. But there's a limit to everything. Most minimalist artists compress the things too much, to the point where it kills the mood, the excitement or the intensity. It becomes a machine, a product of compression and it's definitely laziness. There are just a handful minimalist artists who can keep me excited with simplicity, most of them are just lazy and pretentious. If you can't manage to keep the excitement, emotion or train of thought at a high level, you're not doing hard work, you're just using less words, less paint, less tools or less notes.

I feel like minimalism is a matter of "less is bore" rather than "less is more". That's all.
 
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I agree that there are a lot of pretentious minimalist artists, but I would say that there are a lot of pretentious artists in general. As with any style, minimalism requires expertise to be good, and it is also possible that minimalism attracts many lazy people who think it is easier. But Hemingway sure isn't one of them.
 
I definitely agree about Hemingway, it was the reason why I questioned MrKnickerbocker's dislike of him. Hemingway is one of the very few minimalist artists that I enjoy and that was because it always felt like he didn't try to compress anything, it just happened.

You can say that I was generalizing. This pretentiousness and laziness thing is much more common in minimalism than any other style, I feel.
 
But there is a great deal of diversity among realist authors as well. Just compare realism in its Victorian period (Thomas Hardy, let's say) with the elaborate style of Henry James - barely comparabe at all.
 
That is true but presence of diversity or lack thereof isn't one of my beefs in comparison of these styles. In philosophy and essence, both of those periods are similar. Not in delivery and writing style but like I said, I'm talking strictly philosophy here.

If I'm going to from the way of delivery and writing style, I'd put an argument regarding flow against minimalistic literature. Most of the time the words and ideas are too stuck together that there's no room to breathe and the piece just doesn't flow.

I appreciate Hemingway for being an artist that I like in spite of producing work in a style I don't care for. Much like my appreciation for a hiphop artist, for example. If he got me to like him, he must be pretty good.
 
You'll need to explain what you mean by "philosophy" here.

Also, Hemingway and hip hop... oh my.
 
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