C2 Reading Test – Aesthetics of Silence: Minimalism Across Arts

Read the passage and decide if each statement is True (T), False (F), or Not Given (NG).

Minimalism’s “aesthetics of silence” does not simply remove content; it reorganizes attention. In music, extended rests and sparse textures force listeners to notice room tone, breathing, and the grain of each attack. In architecture, bare planes and undecorated joins make light the main ornament, so that a passing cloud performs as surely as any sculpture. Literature pursues a parallel economy: declarative sentences, withheld motives, and unmarked transitions compel readers to supply links the text refuses to spell out. Silence here is not absence but frame—a perimeter that turns tiny events into arguments.

Yet silence is not universally emancipatory. Critics note that austerity can resemble privilege when it presumes ideal conditions: quiet galleries, patient readers, acoustically generous halls. A minimalist room that promises calm may, in noisy housing or precarious labor, feel like a command to endure lack. The same gesture that frees one audience from distraction may deny another the signals they need to navigate.

Artists often exploit this tension. Some works stage a “performative withholding”: the piece appears empty until the audience’s attempts to complete it generate the very content on display—footsteps, page-turns, a shadow crossing concrete. Others practice subtractive clarity, removing everything that does not bear directly on a relation—line to plane, note to decay—so that what remains is legible with unusual precision. In both cases, silence functions rhetorically: it argues that busyness can hide weak structure and that attention, once unfettered, is a medium of composition.

Institutions, however, struggle to curate silence without converting it into luxury branding. When minimalism is packaged as lifestyle, its ethical bite dulls; “less” becomes a décor choice rather than a critique of excess or a proposal for different forms of care. The question for audiences is practical: does a work’s silence invite shared authorship and finer attunement, or does it merely export the cost of completion to viewers without offering tools to bear it? Minimalism at its strongest does not punish attention; it trains it—teaching audiences how to hear space, read light, and sense argument in what first looks like almost nothing.