German-born psychologist, philosopher & critic (1904-2007)
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.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Film as Art
Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
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
Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
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
Parables of Sun Light
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
Visual Thinking
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.
RUDOLPH ARNHEIM
Parables of Sun Light
A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Parables of Sun Light
But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Visual Thinking
Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Visual Thinking
Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
A revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
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.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
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
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
Today we no longer regard the universe as the cause of our own undeserved troubles but perhaps, on the contrary, as the last refuge from the mismanagement of our earthly affairs.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Parables of Sun Light
It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself--which is what they are most needed for.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Parables of Sun 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.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Film as Art
Orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular. Mere orderliness leads to increasing impoverishment and finally to the lowest possible level of structure, no longer clearly distinguishable from chaos, which is the absence of order. A counterprinciple is needed, to which orderliness is secondary. It must supply what is to be ordered.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order
All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to others made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.
RUDOLF ARNHEIM
Film as Art