Word: abstractions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rumania, survived the Nazi labor camps in Central Europe and was repatriated as an orphan to an Israeli kibbutz in 1944. He studied art and philosophy in Paris-where he still lives with his wife and two children in an icon-cluttered apartment-and until 1965 was an abstract painter. Then came a volte-face; since that year, he has concentrated entirely on life drawing, thus reversing the usual modernist's development. "I was born into modern art," he says, "and it was my start. I think that period is closed, and in any case I have left...
...just as it misconceives the significance of purpose and rationality to view them teleologically (i.e., to maximize their realization without regard to the entities in which they reside and to which they pertain), so it misconceives the value we put on minimizing suffering to think of it as an abstract entity without regard to the entities to which it pertains...
...painless killing does not arise, and therefore whatever rights a brute animal has are not implicated in this way. It does seem, however, that a brute animal does have rights to be spared suffering, and that these rights are its claim and not just the claim of the abstract ideal of minimizing suffering...
...quite distant enough yet: the original Superman was a passion play of technological trash for people who had their fantasies in black-and-white. The perspective is probably more appropriate now. The corruption of the seventies needs to convince itself that it's at least delicious, and the sterile, abstract morality of the supervalues -- for all their McCarthyesque overtones -- provide smugly laughable kitsch. The camp formula is simple: take this gleaming man of steel and turn him into a shambling buffoon...
...average urban low-income American is caught within various and sundry stages of the psychological individuation process. Usually his awareness of matters surrounding him is limited to the surface appearance of the sense-data with which he comes in contact; thus limiting his abilities of thorough abstract analysis. In short, he is in a position whereby psychological manipulation is not difficult to perpetrate upon...