Through the very culture of representation through form, we have come to see that the abstract – like the mathematical – is actually expressed in and through all things, although not determinately.
What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.
Across a range of inferences involving not just language but mathematics, logic problems, and spatial reasoning, sleep has been shown to enhance the formation and understanding of abstract relations, so much so that people often wake having solved a problem that was unsolvable the night before.
Abstracted hatred is incredibly potent. There’s never the risk of having it challenged by the reality of living human beings.
It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all.
Modern man has a very abstract idea of what a wood is. I guess that if you stopped anyone on the street and asked them what a wood actually was, they would see it as a place where big trees grow.
I loved the idea of Bowie as an artist, with his Burroughsian cut-up technique, creating these undecipherable, abstract songs, where we all projected our own meanings onto his jarring word choices and unexpected chord changes.
I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.
If you live in a democracy, it’s very tiring to be always surrounded by great and high abstract generalisations which are, in fact, the most banal and naive cliches dug out of second-rate movements of the late 19th century.
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
While massive datasets may feel very abstract, they are intricately linked to physical place and human culture. And places, like people, have their own individual character and grain.
Music is a physical expression that has a physical impact upon the listener. Sound travels in waves through the air. This is not abstract. This is scientific fact. And it makes physical contact with the eardrum… and with the heart… and with the rest of the body.
She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.
The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that ‘something more’ could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.
But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.
Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.
One of the core values of the startup world is that you must have a list of core values. Like all abstract ideas, they’re easy to dream up and tricky to implement.
I think that ideas exist outside of ourselves. I think somewhere, we’re all connected off in some very abstract land. But somewhere between there and here ideas exist.
Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.
The source of so much of my anxiety in life and the tensions in my relationship is my anxiety about my kid. It’s all very abstract and unfounded and ungrounded.
I loved and protected my own children like a fierce mama bear, but one of them died anyway. It was a dark day when I realized that part of my responsibility in Casey’s death was that I did not love all the children of the world in that same real, not abstract, way.
My work sometimes can be abstract and appear not to have a direct relationship to Afro-American concerns, but, in fact, it is based on that.
When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings – the abstract ones – as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn’t get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.
The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it’s no longer the abstract ideal version; it’s an event.
Idealism is no good. Any concrete dedication to an abstract condition results in unpleasant things like wars.
I’m a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that’s changed a bit.
Thinking – in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature – helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.
Every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as a blueprint of a storm. Don’t be ashamed because you’re human: be proud! Inside you, vaults behind vaults open endlessly. You will never be finished, and that’s as it should be.
Abstract Expressionism – the first American movement to have a worldwide influence – was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you’ll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
There are things that I don’t like to talk about directly. There are relationships that I am in and have been in that I’ve written about in a slightly more abstract way, talking about how it affected me but not so much dealing with the other people involved.
When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet’s abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
I think that magic, at its root, is a very abstract notion. There’s no real, approved definition. And, in that sense, it’s like love; you can only see magic by the effect it has on people.
When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it’s not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.
The average development time for a Hollywood movie is nine years. Nine years for a studio film. And a lot of what you do is abstract.
It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.
Everybody just wants to appreciate time as it’s passing, to be in the moment. It’s the hardest thing to do. You’re either in the unknown future that you’re working toward, or you’re in the past that becomes a little abstract.
I think what I was unconsciously expressing in ‘Black Rainbow’ was a very abstract and metaphorical grief, in the way I had suppressed my grief about my mother dying. In retrospect I realise I started writing ‘Mandy’ as a sort of antidote to that, to sort of express those emotions, to purge that grief.
Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.
I was not an Abstract Expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible.
When I write a book, characters come to life for me somewhere at the back of my head. I strive to make them flesh and blood in an abstract way, in words.
‘Look at Me’ started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That’s an abstract idea; you don’t think that’s going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.
Not all paintings are abstract; they’re not all Jackson Pollock. There’s value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.
We deliberately used elements from Brazilian music and from African and Asian music. Now people can hear that but then it sounded so abstract, they couldn’t hear it.
Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.
I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.
The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings.
