Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vote for Change comes to town. MoveOn.org says it has gained 200,000 new members by linking ticket sales to its website, and organizers expect to raise $10 million to fund Democratic voter-mobilization group America Coming Together, but the truth is that the goals of the tour are abstract. "I don't want to come off as naive," says R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe, "but I put a lot of faith in music. It's an emotional medium. I mean, how could someone fail to be inspired to think about our country after hearing Bruce Springsteen...
...that time meaning was conventional; hence art or architecture was judged primarily by comparing it to prevailing social standards. This approach made the critic’s job wonderfully easy, but of course it was also problematic because it meant that people were paying more attention to an abstract cultural rubric of meaning than to the individual characteristics of the works themselves...
...formal qualities did not amount to genuinely granting a work of art autonomy when discussing meaning. True, formalist critics had thrown out social conventions of meaning in favor of formal analysis, but they then proceeded to use their discussion of form as a platform for the construction of abstract interpretations. Consider what happened with one of the classic formalist darlings, the painter Jackson Pollock. Formalist critics raved about his explosively gestural drips and splashes, but only so that they could begin talking about those marks as vehicles of existential self-expression. Likewise, formalists loved the austere combinations of line, plane...
Contemporary critics have long since grasped this problem with the formalist approach, and have begun to focus more on the ways in which the work itself actively constructs meaning rather than falling into the pre-formalist and formalist traps of proposing that meaning exists in abstract externalities foreign to the work. Artists, too, have begun to create work that explicitly called for this new kind of critical analysis. Minimalist sculpture, for example, took a kind of phenomenological or experiential approach to meaning, attempting to force an examination of the ways in which the viewer’s interaction with...
...Yawkyawk, 1983, in which the two creatures consume each other. Mawurndjul's brother Jimmy Njiminjuma pushed the concept even further in his large-scale serpents from the mid '80s, which wrestle with the very edges of the frame. But no one inhabits Ngalyod better than Mawurndjul, whose increasingly abstract depictions give an insider view of the supreme being. "Where I live," he has said, "a Ngalyod lives under (water), but I paint her from inside my mind...