Rudolf Arnheim Quotes
All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.
Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.
The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought.
Once it is recognized that productive thinking in any area of cognition is perceptual thinking, the central function of art in general education will become evident.
The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple.
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.
Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.
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.
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.
Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.
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.
The line that describes the beautiful is elliptical. It has simplicity and constant change. It cannot be described by a compass, and it changes direction at every one of its points.
The principle of parsimony is valid esthetically in that the artist must not go beyond what is needed for his purpose.
Form is sometimes considered a mere spice added by the artist to the representation of objects in order to make it pleasurable.
Since mechanically obtained randomness contains all kinds of possible permutations, including the most regular ones, it cannot be relied upon always to exhibit a pervasive irregularity.
Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?
No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple. In certain cultures, an overall symmetry may conceal the complexity of the work at first glance.
Modem science, then, maintains on the one hand that nature, both organic and inorganic, strives towards a state of order and that man's actions are governed by the same tendency.
A revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own.
Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.
The more perfect our means of direct experience, the more easily we are caught by the dangerous illusion that perceiving is tantamount to knowing and understanding.
Seeing consists of the grasping of structural features rather than the indiscriminate recording of detail.
The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.
A good documentary or educational film is not raw experience. The material has passed the mill of reason, it has been sifted and interpreted.
It is good to live in a country where all are immigrants ... the newcomer is simply the latest arrival.
Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.