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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
Imagination
Dressed
Pedestrians
Middle
Double
Suspension
Class
Lower
Negation
Art
Popular
Stale
Become
Smell
Disbelief
Airless
Notion
Quotations
Scintillating
Illusion
Closets
Pedestrian
Intellectual
Serves
Exhale

More quotes by Rudolf Arnheim

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The experienced physician, mechanic, or physiologist looking at a wound, an engine, a microscopic preparation, sees things the novice does not see. If both, experts and laymen, were asked to make exact copies of what they see, their drawings would be quite different.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Order is a prerequisite of survival therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.
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
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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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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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Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination.
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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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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A system is in equilibrium when the forces constituting it are arranged in such a way as to compensate each other, like the two weights pulling at the arms of a pair of scales.
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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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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Every act is a visual judgement.
Rudolf Arnheim
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The least touchable object in the world is the eye.
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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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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In a land of immigrants, one was not an alien but simply the latest arrival.
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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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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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