DOING WITH LESS

Seeing doing with less as deferring gratification doesn’t seem to explain everything. In the visual arts, very broadly speaking, less is generally more. I think it was said first by Mies van der Rohe: Less is more.

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More can simply be junk that reduces effectiveness, and less can weed out the unnecessary and increase effectiveness. So doing with less can produce better, more economical form, while being pleasant and compelling to deal with. (If beauty and elegance didn’t serve some human purpose, there wouldn’t be so much of it in history.) While beauty can often require more, it seems that elegance, by definition, requires less.