Minimal art—let's face it—is a bore. With all the cheerfulness of a leper's bell, it proposes that its preachy abstemiousness is somehow good for us. The 20th-century art movement that best echoes Puritanism, minimalism channels Cotton Mather across the ages. Instead of chafing wool, wood-plank architecture, and bans on graven images, we get rows of fluorescent fixtures, stacks of metal boxes, piles of cloth, and, most infamously, a mason's brace of cold bricks laid end to end. Regular folks hate it, and who can blame them? When I go to the supermarket, I hardly expect to... More >>>