Consider the informatic properties of the classical European portrait in a palace: the room has a specific decor; the painting is constructed of wood, canvas, and pigment; the wood is arranged to create a visible frame; the pigment is arranged to create an image of a royal personage.

Informatic abstraction can be applied to any or all of these properties, yielding a unified description of a plethora of art-historical phenomena:

-- Stripping the palace decor down to bare white walls yields the modern art museum gallery.

-- Removing the visible frame from the painting yields another modern art convention.

-- Removing the figurational restriction to royalty represents the liberation of art to represent all things in the world (Brueghel as precursor to Warhol).

-- Removing the representational constraint yields traditional art-historic abstraction.

-- Removing both the representational and formal constraints yields color-field, monochrome, and minimalist art.

-- Removing the materials themselves yields the dematerialization of art, which can be seen (in very different ways) in the rise of performance art, and in Light and Space art.

-- Removing the gallery (and abstracting the materials appropriately) yields land art and public art.

Thus the progressive generalization conventionally attributed to the development of modern and contemporary art can be equally viewed as a process of progressive abstraction.

If abstraction denotes a reduction in informational complexity, then anti-abstraction is the inverse: namely, the adding of information to an entity (in the context of art, an image or object).

The most straightforward means of achieving anti-abstraction is magnification, which has played a key role in the information-creation process fundamental to science. In art, however, magnification as a strategy is relatively rare: it was pursued most famously by Roy Lichtenstein and Chuck Close, with lesser-known practitioners including David Reed, David Wilson, and (in Strange New World, the current show at MCA San Diego) Monica Arreola.

Abstraction and anti-abstraction can be used in tandem as a strategy for generating possible art. For instance, consider the following images, which were collected from the backgrounds of New Yorker cartoons, scanned at 600 dots per inch, and magnified accordingly.

A New Yorker cartoonist uses abstraction to solve the formal problem of recognizably depicting framed artwork in an area no greater than 1-2 square centimeters, using the imprecise imaging technology of a handheld pen, and subject to the additional restriction of not having the depicted artwork call undue attention to itself. This latter restriction derives from the informational role of a New Yorker cartoon image, which is to supply the minimal amount of background context necessary to assist the reader in grasping the humor in the text caption.

Visually this context is supplied in the cartoon image by the depicted human characters. Since the paintings themselves are background to the characters, they function for the reader as second-order background elements and as such are obligated to visually recede to the greatest extent possible, so as not to distract the reader from the purpose of the cartoon. In short, they are not to be looked at.