Word: abstraction
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...actors even came off as smug: during a dramatic tribute to political detainees, one actor grinned upon flubbing a line.Paradise boiled down to a jejune rant against commercialism. It was in Dante’s Purgatory that the play became overtly politically charged. In Hell, a series of perplexing, abstract torture sequences involving puppets and the reading of an interrogation log served to honor the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay. While the material addressed was of the utmost gravity, these scenes were slow-paced and excruciatingly drawn-out. What should have been moving was soporific. And for all its intentional weirdness...
...This was surely a factor in the rise of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists - the New York School - that included artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Arshile Gorky. In the 1940s and '50s, they all lived not far from one another in a combustible concentration on Manhattan's West Side, in Greenwich Village or just south of there. From their continual friction and cross-pollination, a powerful movement was born...
...dots on a screen). And our rationality is not a smooth machinelike intelligence but a complicated landscape of strengths and weaknesses. We're good at solving reasoning problems if they're presented as social puzzles. We don't do as well if the same problems are expressed in the abstract language of logic. A number of researchers argue that the results emerge from our evolution as social creatures, not logicians...
...consistency and individual justice. This is also a nation of widely dispersed power--many states, cities and jurisdictions. Out of this diversity has emerged the staggering intricacy of death-penalty law, as thousands of judges and legislators from coast to coast struggle to breathe real-life meaning into such abstract issues as what constitutes effective counsel, what is the proper balance of authority between judge and jury, what makes a murder "especially heinous," what qualities and defects in a prisoner compel mercy...
...that said, I'm inclined to cut The Great Debaters a certain amount of slack. It wants to speak of large issues that remain relevant to us today. It wants to remind us that the seemingly abstract issues these young people are grappling with had authentic, immediate and dangerous implications in their own lives. And that we are not all that far removed from a time in this country when simply being black, whether outspoken or invisible, was a highly risky business. The film may be manipulative in its construction, and cliché-ridden in some of the incidents...