Idiosyncratic paragraphs Text-only paragraphs differ from one another only in their words. All the words are typographically the same – typeface, spacings, line-lengths piled up into long deep columns. Systematic regularity of text paragraphs is universally inconvenient for readers, who are unable to find and read once against a specific string of words in previously-read paragraphs. All readers have encountered this problem in essays, articles, novels, news reports. Idiosyncratic paragraphs assist memory and retrieval by readers, by uniquely activating the relevant neural substrates for retaining visual memories. Nearly every paragraph in this book is deliberately unique. Edward Tufte, Seeing With Fresh Eyes variation
Only a mind opened to the quality of things Only a mind opened to the quality of things, with a habit of discrimination, sensitized by experience and responsive to new forms and ideas, will be prepared for the enjoyment of this art. The experience of the work of art, like the creation of the work of art itself, is a process ultimately opposed to communication as it is understood now. What has appeared as noise in the first encounter becomes in the end message or necessity, though never message in a perfectly reproducible sense. You cannot translate it into words or make a copy of it which will be quite the same thing. Meyer Schapiro, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art The work is what it meansThe medium is the messageWhat the painting was not about