abstraction ideas I agree with

Insistence on form alone assumes that form arises out of the ether, a priori, without any context or culturally specific symbolic meaning — a theory espoused by the original guy at the back of the philosophy class. In other words, it assumes a universality, a common language across all people, which is not only factually wrong but also ethically and politically problematic, because it asserts that the values of the person making the argument are not only (falsely) universal but superior to other beliefs as well, by virtue of their universality.

There are no universals in form, in meaning, in language, in beauty, in any of the realms that a number of Modernists hoped for. Even the laws of physics lie. There is only multiplicity — messy, chaotic, conflicting, enriching, and life-sustaining.
-from Muddying the Circumscribed Myth of Abstraction, by Alexis Clements