the.com/abstraction
reality with the boring parts deleted so your brain doesn't melt
means The act of pulling a general idea or pattern away from specific real-world details, leaving a simplified concept you can actually think about.
from From Latin abstrahere, "to drag away" — ab- ("away from") plus trahere ("to pull, draw," the same root that gives us tractor and traction). So an abstraction is literally something dragged off from the messy particulars. It entered English through Latin scholarly and philosophical use, where thinkers had long been busy hauling pure ideas out of cluttered reality.
- art origin
- Kandinsky reportedly sparked it by seeing a sideways painting
- in code
- hiding complexity so you forget the machine exists
- ladder
- too high and your idea means nothing
- etymology
- Latin for 'to drag away' from concrete things
abstract expressionism — art movement led by jackson pollock in 1950s new york, emphasizing gesture and non-representational forms
cubism — picasso and braque's early 1900s movement that deconstructed objects into geometric abstractions
suprematism — kazimir malevich's 1915 russian avant-garde movement reducing art to pure geometric abstraction