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Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. Suspension of disbelief has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion.

Rudolf Arnheim

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Rudolf Arnheim
Age: 102 †
Born: 1904
Born: July 15
Died: 2007
Died: June 9
Art Historian
Author
Film Critic
Film Scholar
Pedagogue
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Rudolph Arnheim
Intellectual
Serves
Exhale
Imagination
Dressed
Pedestrians
Middle
Double
Suspension
Class
Lower
Negation
Art
Popular
Stale
Become
Smell
Disbelief
Airless
Notion
Quotations
Scintillating
Illusion
Closets
Pedestrian

More quotes by Rudolf Arnheim

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At one of the annual conventions of the American Society for Aesthetics much confusion arose when the Society for Anesthetics met at the same time in the same hotel.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order.
Rudolf Arnheim
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A good documentary or educational film is not raw experience. The material has passed the mill of reason, it has been sifted and interpreted.
Rudolf Arnheim
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The least touchable object in the world is the eye.
Rudolf Arnheim
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As one gets older, it happens that in the morning one fails to remember the airplane trip to be taken in a few hours or the lecture scheduled for the afternoon.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Form is sometimes considered a mere spice added by the artist to the representation of objects in order to make it pleasurable.
Rudolf Arnheim
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In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.
Rudolf Arnheim
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The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought.
Rudolf Arnheim
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When the thing observed... is seen as an agglomeration of pieces, the details lose their meaning and the whole becomes unrecognizable. This is often true of snapshots in which no pattern of salient shapes organizes the mass of vague and complex nuances.
Rudolf Arnheim
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The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling--these are the tools of the dancer.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.
Rudolf Arnheim
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It is good to live in a country where all are immigrants ... the newcomer is simply the latest arrival.
Rudolf Arnheim
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The rehabilitation of order as a universal principle, however, suggested at the same time that orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.
Rudolf Arnheim
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The clarification of visual forms and their organization in integrated patterns as well as the attribution of such forms to suitable objects is one of the most effective training grounds of the young mind.
Rudolf Arnheim
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The ambition of instantaneous photography... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.
Rudolf Arnheim
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A revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own.
Rudolf Arnheim
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The foreign accent was a promise, and indeed, all over the country, European imports added spice to the sciences, the arts, and other areas. What one had to give was not considered inferior to what one received.
Rudolf Arnheim