Nothing Is More Humbling Than To Look

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.

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.

The Ambition Of Instantaneous Photography... Was That Of Preserving The Spontaneity Of Action And Avoiding Any Indication That The Presence Of The Picture Taker Had A Modifying Influence On What Was Going On.

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.

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.