In the arts, maximalism, a reaction against minimalism, is an aesthetic of excess. The philosophy can be summarized as "more is more", contrasting with the minimalist motto "less is more".
Literature
The term maximalism is sometimes associated with post-modern novels, such as those by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, where digression, reference, and elaboration of detail occupy a great fraction of the text. It can refer to anything seen as excessive, overtly complex and "showy", providing redundant overkill in features and attachments, grossness in quantity and quality, or the tendency to add and accumulate to excess. Novelist John Barth defines literary maximalism through the medieval Roman Catholic Church's opposition between "two...roads to grace:" Takayoshi Ishiwari elaborates on Barth's definition by including a postmodern approach to the notion of authenticity. Thus:
Music
In music, Richard Taruskin uses the term "maximalism" to describe the modernism of the period from 1890 to 1914, especially in German-speaking regions, defining it as "a radical intensification of means toward accepted or traditional ends". This view has been challenged, however, on the grounds that Taruskin uses the term merely as an "empty signifier" that is filled with "a range of musical features—big orchestration, motivic and harmonic complexity, and so on—that he takes to be typical of modernism". Taruskin, in any case, did not originate this sense of the term, which had been used by the mid-1960s with reference to Russian composers of the same period, of whom Sergei Prokofiev was "the last". Contemporary maximalist music is defined by composer David A. Jaffe as that which "embraces heterogeneity and allows for complex systems of juxtapositions and collisions, in which all outside influences are viewed as potential raw material". Examples include the music of Edgard Varèse, Charles Ives, and Frank Zappa. In a different sense, Milton Babbitt has been described as a "professed maximalist", his goal being, "to make music as much as it can be rather than as little as one can get away with". Richard Toop, on the other hand, considers that musical maximalism "is to be understood at least partly as 'antiminimalism'". Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy has also been described as a maximalist work.
Maximalism as a term in the plastic arts is used by art historianRobert Pincus-Witten to describe a group of artists, including future Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Schnabel and David Salle, associated with the turbulent beginnings of Neo-expressionism in the late 1970s. These artist were in part "stimulated out of sheer despair with so long a diet of Reductivist Minimalism" This maximalism was prefigured in the mid-1960s by certain psychoanalytically oriented paintings by Gary Stephan. Charlotte Rivers describes how "maximalism celebrates richness and excess in graphic design", characterized by decoration, sensuality, luxury and fantasy, citing examples from the work of illustrator Kam Tang and artist Julie Verhoeven. Art historianGao Minglu connects maximalism in Chinese visual art to the literary definition by describing the emphasis on "the spiritual experience of the artist in the process of creation as a self-contemplation outside and beyond the artwork itself...These artists pay more attention to the process of creation and the uncertainty of meaning and instability in a work. Meaning is not reflected directly in a work because they believe that what is in the artist's mind at the moment of creation may not necessarily appear in his work." Examples include the work of artists, Cao Kai, Ding Yi, Gu Dexin and Li Huasheng. Maximalist cinema includes the likes of directorsZack Snyder, Julie Taymor, Tony Scott, Paul W.S. Anderson, Edgar Wright and Park Chan-wook.
