Word: abstractedly
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...keep them in check. So I was extremely surprised when I discovered that Plato, the most celebrated philosopher in the Western tradition and a champion of virtue and reason, believed that an appreciation for physical beauty was the first step in the ascent towards the contemplation of the abstract "form of the good...
...could that be? What did the abstract, immutable beauty of, say, geometry, have to do with the concrete, transitory comeliness of a face, or even of a sunset? Clearly for a whole lot of people the appreciation of concrete beauty is not the beginning of a route to moral or intellectual perfection but the exact opposite...
...Diminishment I find thee here and there unclear" is a line that reveals too much about this new book by Graham, a Pulitzer-prizewinning poet. The brilliant imagery that Graham has married to abstract thought in the past is often arid or withheld here, replaced by long drifts of spare and enigmatic statements or imperatives clothed in noble posturing. Yet when the poems do work (see particularly the title piece), Graham can still use language like a philosopher's spade to dig into experience--how we sense and think. These can be intoxicatingly deft moments, close to the ground...
...Gursky's Untitled, 1993, in which the vaguely modulated picture surface resolves into an expanse of well-tread, nubby carpet. Austere and precisely executed like all his other photographs, Untitled, 1993 transforms the humdrum by deeming it worthy of attention. This is astounding realism, both representational and abstract, documentary and mythical...
...this he was right, and he was right too in his belief that if you scratched any American abstraction, you would find a landscape not far below the surface. This was part of the deep sympathy that ran between Phillips and Dove: a belief that "abstraction" was not autonomous, that it was a way of getting to the core of reality by jettisoning whatever might be incidental. Then, Phillips wrote, "abstract art ceases to be an amusement for the aesthete and becomes a divine activity." Phillips couldn't be Ryder's patron: the man was dead. But he was Dove...