Word: abstractedly
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...complete understanding of holidays, however, must include more than just abstract drama. While sixteenth century artists like Johann Sebastian Bach certainly had a sincere religious motivation to continue the tradition of setting the Passion--the biblical story of Christ's arrest and crucifixion--to music, they certainly did not fail to take advantage of the abstract drama which secular audiences can easily appreciate...
...while performers may distract themselves with technical and aesthetic tasks, audiences have a more difficult time. Unlike instrumental pieces in which the drama is abstract, the St. John Passion has at its center a highly problematic text, simultaneously sacred and offensive. The audience member, whether he or she is Christian or simply wishes to enjoy the tradition of the Passion story at Easter time, is frustrated by the impossibility of sympathizing with the tragedy of the Passion without sympathizing also with the textual culpability of the Jews. And those who do not attend may be frustrated that it is received...
Close, when a student at Yale, was enraptured by the work of the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning: he loved his color and luscious paint surface, while realizing that they couldn't possibly be imitated. Imitating de Kooning was the bane of student existence: no originality could come of it. But Close, in his ruminative way, hankered after the paradise of the senses that de Kooning's touch represented, and it surfaces in the work that he had begun to do just before his paralysis in 1989 and was able to develop after his partial recovery. The dots and pixels...
Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth...
...Middle Kingdom, where students had demonstrated in 1919; where Mao had proclaimed a "People's Republic" in 1949 on behalf of the Chinese people who had "stood up"; and where leaders customarily inspect their People's Liberation Army troops--is a virtual monument to People Power in the abstract. Its western edge is taken up by the Great Hall of the People. Its eastern side is dominated by the Museum of Chinese Revolution. The Mao Zedong mausoleum swallows up its southern face...