It's the faculty-lounge problem again: people in business deal with real things, people in faculty lounges deal with ideas, abstractions, theories; they're swayed by this school of thought and that; they're macro.
The album is an idea, an abstraction, a sublime idealization of Coltrane's religious philosophy.
And that idea of abstraction included even the "destroyed" sweaters from the 1980s re-visited.
"I liked his idea of abstraction as a palliative response to that trauma," Mr. Eleey said.
"As a moral idea, an abstraction, Manhattan has a place in everybody's thinking throughout the world," Berger writes.
There are so many varieties, and the idea of abstraction has been championed by so many, and for such widely differing reasons.
It helps to let go of the Euro-American idea that abstraction is purely a formal phenomenon; in Indian modernism it can also be a rupture in narrative.
"The idea of abstraction," he said, "is to hide the details". It requires recognizing patterns and distilling complexity into a precise, clear summary.
This was not an ethereal ghost but a concrete manifestation of a spiritual idea, an abstraction made comprehensible by stunningly pure form.
Few would argue with the idea that abstraction is "a major contribution" to the visual arts, as put forward by the show's curator, Robert Saltonstall Mattison.
It focused attention on the central idea of abstraction -- finding general patterns from specific problems and building software tools that embody each pattern.
