Quote

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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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
Often
Shapes
Observed
True
Mass
Organize
Whole
Meaning
Vague
Salient
Thing
Pieces
Pattern
Unrecognizable
Lose
Complexes
Organizes
Becomes
Complex
Nuances
Loses
Patterns
Snapshots
Seen
Details
Nuance

More quotes by 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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Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.
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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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Every act is a visual judgement.
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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In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.
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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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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Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.
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
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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 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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The least touchable object in the world is the eye.
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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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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Order is a prerequisite of survival therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.
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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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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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