The Absence of Art or the Art of Absence?

September 1, 2022

By Keith Barton

Quakers have long cultivated an aesthetic of minimalism, having sought during their prominence in eighteenth-century colonial America to weed out superfluity and excess of all kinds. This involved a general prohibition on music, sports, painting, coat collars, alcohol consumption, theater, and fiction, as well as various boycotts of goods produced by slave labor, including cotton, sugar, and rum. Some of this exacting asceticism was driven by an impulse to remove what John Woolman described as the seeds of wars in these our possessions, and some of it was driven by a peculiar aesthetic. READ MORE