"Minimalism should be seen in its historical place - a reaction to, and advance on what went before." If it's possible to justify minimalism, this can't be how to do it. In what way does art advance? It's not a science, it's not a theory that observers can investigate and test. Can it be justified as a reaction to what went before? Only if what went before can be justified on the basis of what went before and so on, until we disappear up our own historical justification. We have to look at what we've got and the sort of reality this work presents how does it affects the way we see the world. The strength of minimalism as stated in the article is that "they wanted the work to be stripped of artifice, pared down to the bare essentials so that the viewer looks only at the thing itself rather then a picture or a sculpture of something." Its strength has been the lesson it gives us about looking at art, but the minimalists took everything interesting out in order to say the obvious - all art is a thing in itself, even the stuff with images. Magritte painted a pipe and said this is not a pipe, and he was right. Christopher Clack (artist), London