Abstract

[opening paragraph]: While there are many ideas worthy of test, and especially some exciting speculations on how ‘high level’ processing might feed back into ‘low level’ visual perception, the scheme of ‘laws’ proposed by Ramachandran and Hirstein underestimates the ambition of art, at least as it is probably understood by most serious contemporary practitioners. It should be retitled ‘The Science of Design'. If Ramachandran and Hirstein had looked into the literature of design, instead of art, they would have come upon somewhat similar, though more subjective, explorations of significantly overlapping ideas; symmetry, contrast, methods of limiting distraction, avoiding confusion, etc. Design is an essential element of the artist's training, but it is not the equivalent of art; design is to art as engineering is to science -- it does a lot of heavy lifting but does not in itself contain or explain the agenda