If you write an academic paper, you include an “abstract;” a brief synopsis of the entire work. If you’re in business, you might work hard on an “elevator pitch” — a brief abstract of the product or service you’re trying to push, timed so you can deliver the whole thing while trapped in an elevator between floors. If you’re an artist, you might choose to work in abstract art. That’s art that either emphasizes forms, or is otherwise “nonrepresentational.” With art, what’s “abstract” a little bit more complicated, of course — there’s certainly art that is both abstract and representational. But anyway, back to abstract. It can also mean “separate,” as in an “abstract idea of a house” being not any specific house, but the “essence of houseness,” so to speak. It can refer to a general characteristic such as beauty or poverty. It can even mean difficult to understand, although that particular meaning of “abstract” might really be a result of confusing “abstract” with “abstruse.” Either way, it’s too late now!
“Abstract” is a pretty versatile word (he said abstractedly). It comes from Latin, where it’s a compound of “abs” (away, to remove) and “trahere” (to take or draw — not the pencil kind of draw; the “drawing ahead” kind of draw). So “abstract,” etymologically, means “take away.” This is pretty apt, since another term for an “elevator pitch” is a “take away.”
A bit of a conundrum about an abstract is that it might be something you can grasp quickly and get a basic understanding of the whole — like the abstract of a paper, or the essence of an idea — but it might instead be something that you can’t grasp because it’s too “far away” or complex.
An abstract might just omit details. We ignore details all the time, of course, without using the word “abstract.” And oddly enough, if you get lost in the details of something, we call that “being abstracted” even though in a way it’s quite the opposite.
But just omitting details isn’t enough to call something abstract. If you take a closeup photo, for example, it omits all sorts of details of the larger context, but what you have is a closeup, not an abstract. But what if you unfocus your lens so your photo is blurry? That omits details too — does that make it abstract? Aside from photos, what if you simply describe something incompletely? You’re leaving out details, so does that make your description an abstract?
The unsatisfying answer to all those irritating questions is maybe. A blurry or closeup photo might be an abstract. Describing a statue as “carved marble thing on a pedestal” might be virtually useless, or it might be an abstract. It probably depends on your intentions.
Intention is an interesting notion. In the abstract it means an aim or a purpose. It generally implies sequence; you start with an intention, which leads to action, which leads to a result. But there are plenty of cases where that sequence is inverted, tangled up, or omitted altogether. One very abstract notion of art, of course, is that the intention of art is to explore the idea of intention itself. If you start without any particular intention and end up somewhere or with something, maybe you can at that point apply intention, and maybe it still works.
You might notice, among your photos, a blurry closeup you took — maybe by accident. It’s not an abstract photo; it’s just a mistake. But what if you print that accidental photo on a high-quality dye-sublimation printer on archival paper, mount it in a nice frame, and hang it prominently in a gallery? It’s probably an abstract photo at that point. You might pin a little card next to it with an abstract; something like “A found photo characterizing the opportunities abounding in the unexpected juxtapositions of context and action….” If you’re the gallery owner, you might even find yourself in an elevator with some bankers. You could deliver an abstract pitch about your gallery and why you need funding to open new locations (Tokyo, Paris, Dubai, and Honolulu would be my advice). But some of the bankers might not listen because they’re too abstracted by the details of what the stock market is up to that day.
So there you go: the abstract takeaway elevator pitch.
