Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.
Eric KandelRead
In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.
Interpretation
Reductionism in art and science helps us appreciate fundamental elements more deeply.
Eric Kandel's quote emphasizes that reductionism—the practice of breaking complex phenomena into simpler components—enhances our understanding of art and science rather than diminishing it. By examining individual elements such as color, light, and perspective, we can gain fresh insights that enrich our overall perception and appreciation of both disciplines.
In practice
This quote can be used in an art class to discuss the importance of analyzing individual elements.
Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.
Psychoanalysis has a degree of unreliability about it. You will never know whether you've found the truth. You may find a subjective truth, but you don't know.
You learn emotional experiences as much as you learn cognitive experiences, except that they are more unconscious. Sometimes one represses the cognitive component of it, but it's often more difficult to repress the emotional component.
Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.
A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.
There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.
The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer's movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.
Quite frankly, I didn't become an actor to become a movie star. I have never dreamed about being the most famous person on the planet. I just want to do really good work.
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
Everyday life is like programming, I guess. If you love something you can put beauty into it.
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