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Rudolf Arnheim
Entropy and Art
An Essay on Disorder and Order
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$17.95, £10.95 paperback
978-0-520-02617-9
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64 pages, 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 7 b/w photographs, 3 line illustrations
January 1974, Available worldwide
Categories: Art; Art Theory

"The psychology of art is never as easy as a-b-c, but this book avoids the general obtuseness of such treatises. It is, however, very demanding of its readers. It will give your mind a good honing."—Art Direction
Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand. Arrangements such as the layout of a city or building, a set of tools, a display of merchandise, the verbal exposition of facts or ideas, or a painting or piece of music are called orderly when an observer or listener can grasp their overall structure and the ramification of the structure in some detail. Order makes it possible to focus on what is alike and what is different, what belongs together and what is segregated. When nothing superfluous is included and nothing indispensable left out, one can understand the interrelation of the whole and its parts, as well as the hierarchic scale of importance and power by which some structural features are dominant, others subordinate.
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
Rudolf Arnheim is Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art at Harvard University. For many years he was a member of the Psychology Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and he spent his last ten academic years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he now lives.