Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract to express it in the most general terms to find some universal formula for it.
I believe that history has shape order and meaning that exceptional men as much as economic forces produce change and that passe abstractions like beauty nobility and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.
Abstraction brings the world into more complex variable relations it can extract beauty alternative topographies ugliness and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.
Wisdom is the abstract of the past but beauty is the promise of the future.
Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.
Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly decisively for good.
It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.
Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties and then tailing off.
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.
Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.