Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...fact when Helen Frankenthaler first exhibited one of her early abstract paintings, a teacher of hers asked her why she was exhibiting her paint rags. But Frankenthaler did not rise to her present fame by dabbling idly and relying on her name and good fortune to pull her through. Modern artists, believe it or not, have theory behind their work--complicated and highly-philosophical theory at times--that often ends up being a more important influence on their followers than the actual works...
Ignoring the theory behind it, Davis's work holds up better in the eyes of the uninitiated than some other abstract art of the past 50 years because Davis usually gives the viewer a little piece of reality to hang on to--a word or a number slipped in among patches of color, or a form that distinctly resembles a human being. These touches are somehow reassuring to those who prefer traditional portrait and landscape art; Davis uses the reassurance to persuade viewers to move further into his art and enjoy the clever play of lines and shapes without worrying...
...tinkered with, not to be understood; their books foster self-hatred. Gardner's criticism of his colleagues is the most valuable part of On Moral Fiction. He deftly shows what authors like Vonnegut and Heller lack, entertaining as they are. We may be unable to swallow in the abstract the statement that the missing quality is "love," or "morality"; but leaving aside these culturally ambiguous, exhausted words floating like smoke-screens between us and Gardner's criticisms, he makes sense...
...like Matthew Arnold who tried to diagnose the ills of their societies. And Gardner's calls for "Beauty, Truth and Goodness" are not far removed from Arnold's famous celebration of "sweetness and light." But Gardner lacks the formal power, the rhetorical skill which Arnold employed to make the abstract palatable and comprehensible. Gardner's book is structureless. The divisions between chapters are arbitrary, and just about the only overall element of the book that seems planned is the appearance of Thor's hammer at start and finish...
...take from it these insights, a few anecdotes, and perhaps a sense of Gardner himself. But, as Gardner repeats, only art--not criticism--can embody the eternal verities, those elusive ideas of "Beauty, Truth and Goodness." On Moral Fictionfails because Gardner valiantly tries to write non-fiction about abstract concepts. But, he himself agrees, fiction alone can do justice to them...