Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like most operas, The Magic Flute has its cultists, opera purists have harrumphed at Bergman's "popularization" of the original libretto. But he's done the rest of us a service--to the uninitiated The Magic Flute's message can be hard to fathom, seeming alternately simpleminded and ponderously abstract. The opera is an allegorical celebration of the ideals of the Masonic brotherhood, a secret, illegal society to which Mozart belonged, and the elaborate rituals that take up over half the opera are closely modeled on the initiation rites of the Order. Eighteenth century audiences would have instantly recognized...
Even as late as the 19th century, Crichton says, physicians were writing with strength and conviction. Now, however, "voices are passive, modifiers are abstract and qualifying clauses abound. The general tone is one of utmost timidity, going far beyond sensible caution." Crichton finds it all very puzzling. "An eminent surgeon strides purposefully into the operating room each day," he says, "but to read his papers, you wonder how he finds the courage to get out of bed in the morning." Crichton has a theory about the use of obfuscating medical language. In explaining it, however, he unwittingly demonstrates that jargon...
That pessimism is abstract, based, he says, on his conceptions of the nature of man and history. It certainly isn't derived from his personal success or prospects. His thrice-weekly column is currently syndicated in some 140 newspapers, and he writes a biweekly column for Newsweek that began last week. He is a regular commentator on a Washington TV station, and frequently appears on PBS's "Agronsky and Company". He has already established himself as one of the most sophisticated conservative thinkers in the country--much more complex and coherent than William F. Buckley Jr., immeasurably superior...
...longest, costliest, most bitterly fought lawsuits in art history came to an end last week. It had been almost six years since Mark Rothko, whose large canvases filled with luminous rectangles of color had established him as a leader of American abstract expressionism, slit his wrists in his Manhattan studio, leaving his estate to a charitable trust for needy older artists. Under New York State law, Rothko's two children (Kate, now 24, and Christopher, 12) claimed 50% of it. Since 1970, the children and their lawyers alleged, there had been a conspiracy between Rothko's executors-Accountant...
...work of art, which is itself an abstract reality, must be formed from invented elements. The concrete significance arises out of a combination of morphological archetypes and the architectonic conditions appropriate to its own intrinsic organism...