Word: abstraction
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...comparison seems right to me. Yesterday’s cruel hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington are incomprehensible—for their infamy and not for some abstract sense of evil, but because I have a friend who worked in the financial district of New York, and I don’t know if he is alive. Residents in my house made frantic telephone calls to check on the health of parents who were visiting the Pentagon. Yesterday is simply incomprehensible because, for the first time, I felt an irrational...
Clearly, that can't be the whole story from the vast continent, and Harvard's Fogg Museum is filling in at least some of the gaps with a show of its diametric opposite: geometric abstraction, drawn from a distinguished and systematic collection made by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, who lives in Caracas, Venezuela, and is an ardent evangelist for South American abstract painters and sculptors. Cisneros has a severe and finely tuned eye, and her collection is remarkably free from nationalist bias. This is a very catholic collection. Of course, some of the artists in it, such as the Venezuelan...
...miles? And what compels us to watch them at play and pay them exorbitantly for that privilege? It is better explained from inside a stadium filled with 80,000 singing, screaming fans, strangers bonding to celebrate the physical prowess of mortals, sharing victory that, although senseless in the abstract, provokes a kind of unfettered joy that even art and music can't match. It's millions of French citizens pouring into the streets to celebrate a World Cup triumph. It's the exhilaration of a downhill run, sinking a jump shot, holing a long putt. It's you or your...
Philosophers like Leibniz and Kant hypothesized that the mind innately thinks in such categories as space, time, number, causation and human intentions. Spelke turned this philosophy into experimental science and showed that infants have an abstract understanding of these categories of reality. They know that objects continue to exist even when you don't look at them and that they can't pass through barriers. Other psychologists--some of them her students--have documented when in the first year of life the other basic categories come online. With these scaffolds in place, babies can understand the world as they...
...Flipping it open you expect to find a catalogue of radio parts, but instead get sucked in by the new-old-fashioned penwork of Matt Kindt. He relies on just a few, expressive strokes and flat blocks of black ink to create the art deco world of "Pistolwhip." Nearly abstract slashes and squiggles organize themselves into characters and place, often seen from wild points of view. One panel uses a briefcase perspective, a gigantic wrist at the bottom and a tiny head...