Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order

by Rudolf Arnheim

Overview

This essay is an attempt to reconcile the disturbing contradiction between the striving for order in nature and in man and the principle of entropy implicit in the second law of thermodynamics - between the tendency toward greater organization and the general trend of the material universe toward death and disorder.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520266001
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/02/2010
Edition description:	First Edition, 40th Anniversary Edition
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) was Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Sarah Lawrence College. He was author of many books, including Art and Visual Perception, Film as Art, Power of the Center, and Visual Thinking.

Table of Contents

I
Useful order
Reflections of physical order
Disorder and degradation
What the physicist has in mind

Information and order
Probability and structure
Equilibrium
Tension reduction and wear and tear
The virtue of constraints
The structural theme

II
Order in the second place
The pleasures of tension reduction
Homeostasis is not enough
A need for complexity
Art made simple
Call for structure
Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Suitably unpretentious and fragmentarily brilliant in the interplay of elements from the author's vast reading and experience of experimental psychology." 

Leonardo

"Arnheim was the best kind of romantic. His wisdom, his patient explanations and lyrical enthusiasm are those of a teacher."

New York Times

"The psychology of art is never as easy as a-b-c, but this book avoids the general obtuseness of such treatises. It will give your mind a good honing."

Art Direction

"Suitably unpretentious and fragmentarily brilliant in the interplay of elements from the author's vast reading and experience of experimental psychology." 

Leonardo