Songs communicated emotion and developed social bonds: this exquisite idea has been well-documented recently by the psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist.
The winds make us lean towards this place, to inhale its spirit, and the broken waters summon us to baptize our dreams, and, in our own foreign way, contribute to the exquisite idea that is Northern Ireland.
Otherwise the exhibition takes an oddly clinical approach to the exquisite corpse idea, putting it, so to speak, on the dissecting table.
The exquisite corpse idea is taken even further at Casey Kaplan on West 14th Street, where Jens Hoffman, an independent curator from Berlin, has selected works by eight artists, including Rosemarie Troekel and the Brazilian installation artist Marepe, and then invited four young curators to propose exhibition titles and explanations for the ensemble.
But however adolescent her sentiments may have been, she voiced them with exquisite sophistication, taking the idea of a droopy raglan-sleeved shirt, for example, cutting it in satin and slitting the sleeves to articulate the shoulder.
The true punks — those who lived and survived that moment — should find an exquisite irony in the idea that their no-future kick at a dead-end society should, 40 years on, have moved from a defiant statement from society's impoverished and self-proclaimed social outcasts to a display of clothes for global celebrities and the super-rich having a ball.
What ties it all together is Ms. Denes's insistence on marrying ambitious intellectual ideas with exquisite formal execution.
But Ms. Hewitt, Andras Schiff and Minsoo Sohn combine distinctive ideas with exquisite taste in their performances and recordings.
Tawada's strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity, and what it means to own someone else's story or one's own.
Nor does it accept the inevitability of a federal, "superstate" European Union; Mr Védrine was quick to puncture, with exquisite politeness, the federal ideas mapped out last May by Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister.
But aside from the brooding drama of Design, with its writhing bassline and vertiginous, unexpected melodic switch-ups, Glasser displays far less interest in disrupting the exquisite surface of her ideas than she did on Ring.
