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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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When a system is considered in two different states, the difference in volume or in any other property, between the two states, depends solely upon those states themselves and not upon the manner in which the system may pass from one state to the other.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Order is a prerequisite of survival therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.
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 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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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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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