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No longer can we consider what the artist does to be a self-contained activity, mysteriously inspired from above, unrelated and unrelatable to other human activities. Instead, we recognize the exalted kind of seeing that leads to the creation of great art as an outgrowth of the humbler and more common activity of the eyes in everyday life. Just as the prosaic search for information is "artistic" because it involves giving and finding shape and meaning, so the artist's conceiving is an instrument of life, a refined way of understanding who and where we are.
Rudolf Arnheim -
In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.
Rudolf Arnheim
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Climbing is a heroic liberating act; and height spontaneously symbolizes things of high value, be it in the value of worldly power or of spirituality. To rise in an elevator, balloon, or airplane is to experience being liberated from weight, sublimated, invested with superhuman abilities. In addition, to rise from the earth is to approach the realm of light and overview. Therefore the negative overcoming of weight is at the same time the positive achievement of enlightenment and an unobstructed outlook.
Rudolf Arnheim -
Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.
Rudolf Arnheim -
The principle of parsimony is valid esthetically in that the artist must not go beyond what is needed for his purpose.
Rudolf Arnheim -
From building a fire one can learn something about artistic composition. If you use only small kindling and large logs, the fire will quickly eat up the small pieces but will not become strong enough to attack the large ones. You must supply a scale of sizes from the smallest to the largest. The human eye also will not make its way into a painting or building unless a continuum of shapes leads from the small to the large, from the large to the small.
Rudolf Arnheim -
Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?
Rudolf Arnheim -
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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Squeezed for money, the affected households often need to lower the quality of their food, which then impacts the overall development of their children.
Rudolf Arnheim -
All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.
Rudolf Arnheim -
The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.
Rudolf Arnheim -
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 -
What, then, is the basic difference between today's computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to seebut not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern--a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.
Rudolf Arnheim