Word: abstractedly
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...that it was an abstract lesson that we watched all week, as mothers rocked blinded children in their arms and old men convulsed in their hospital beds. The pictures were all too real. More human frailty was on display than human progress. Odd how little it takes to pick up the facts involved in so sudden a catastrophe-to learn all about "methyl isocyanate," and how the pressure built up in a storage tank too rapidly for the "scrubber" to neutralize the gas that escaped into the atmosphere. Even a tragedy becomes a moment in technology, as if we feel...
...evident silliness of such messages aside, the danger of this school is that the too-systematic quest for an abstract goal can lead one from mere intellectual confusion to damnable, personal corruption. It is through such hunting, so often mistaken for the pursuit of happiness, that cultured or half religious people are transformed into mere snobs, feminists to shrews, athletes to books, and scientists to subversives. Lasch has metamorphosed from a would-be thinker into a rather loose writer...
...lesson to be learned here about attempts to incorporate morality into politics. It is not enough to say only that abortion is wrong, for our legal code isn't simply a list of "Thou shalt nots." The questions the abortion issue raises are perplexing enough in the realm of abstract morality, but trying to translate them into concrete legal doctrines requires a Hercules of jurisprudence. If arrogant abortion foes like New York Archbishop John J. O'Connor actually tried to answer these questions, they would realize that the issue isn't so clear-cut, and perhaps they would be more...
...inlets and adamant pirouettes. Let painting be painting, they decided, without a competing spectacle at its own borders. This preference soon converged with Bauhaus notions of design, which enforced the modernist distaste for frills. By midcentury, the opponents of effusive framing had their ultimate triumph: the frameless wafers of abstract expressionism...
...frame also has its uses for artists looking to make abstract work more articulate. Two years ago, Robert Morris began showing a series of white bas-relief works that seemed to vent nuclear anxieties in a visual language of medieval fatalism. Embedded in an infernal slurry of plaster, human faces and fractured skeletons held the poses of apocalyptic death agony. This year Morris returned to painting with a series of more ambiguous abstractions. But a skeletal frieze has been retained along the frame to specify the note of mortal dread. Similarly, in 1979 Jasper Johns embedded a train of cutlery...