For example, in the case of a young man who awoke from a coma after a car crash believing that his mother was an imposter, Ramachandran believes that there was damage to a neural route that takes visual information to his amygdala (a part of the brain involved in investing objects with emotional significance).
Instead of idealizing nature, as the classicists advocated, he painted its imperfections, investing objects with uniqueness and personality.
Myth also invests manufactured objects with a supernatural grace or glory.
If Station Eleven is organized around a discontinuity between forms of life, it invests in objects and works of art to restore a tenuous sense of continuity.
"By investing everyday objects with the highest design principles, Baillie Scott also strove to integrate art and life," Ms. Kaplan said.
Like avant-garde art, the avant-garde approach to vegetables can take many forms: investing ordinary objects with extra significance, boldly upending a tradition or juxtaposing elements that appear disparate.
Compact, if conceptually substantial, it opens with a couple of 19th-century vases that embody the Arts and Crafts ethic of investing utilitarian objects with value through handwork and refined, nature-inspired imagery.
Like Mr. Liccardi, Lynne Hefner Ferrante pays homage to the assemblages of Alfonso Ossorio, whose "congregations" invested found objects -- toys and other items -- with complex new meanings, making pointed social and political critiques.
Occasionally this is a bit precious, as with the tiny trees floating in limbo, but in most cases the treatment succeeds in investing the objects with a captivating, almost surreal, presence.
Szabó emphasizes iconography in his films, insofar as he tends to invest certain objects and places with symbolic meaning.
