Art Perception * David Cycleback

Art Perception

by David Cycleback

1
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Fans feel a connection to cartoon characters,

seeing them as if they’re living beings,
following their lives, laughing at their jokes,
feeling good when good things happen to them
and bad when bad things happen. A kid can feel
closer to a cartoon character than a living,
breathing next door neighbor.

2
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Many feel a human-to-human connection to

the figure in this Modigliani painting even
though it is not physically human in many
ways.

3
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Authentic Colors?

1800s Harper's Woodcuts, or woodcut prints from the magazine

Harper's Weekly, are popularly collected today. The images show
nineteenth century life, including celebrities, sports, US
Presidents, war, high society, nature and street life. Though
originally black and white, some of the prints have been hand
colored over the years. As age is important to collectors, prints
that were colored in the 1800s are more valuable than those
colored recently. The problem is that modern ideas lead collectors
to misdate the coloring.
Due to their notions about the old fashioned Victorian era,
most people assume that vintage 1800s coloring will be subtle,
soft, pallid and conservative. However, 1800s coloring was
typically bright, gaudy, bold and even tacky to modern taste. As
Victorian people didn’t have color televisions, motion pictures or
video games, and were restricted in their travel, they liked their
images of exotic places and faraway celebrities to be colored
exciting. A learned forger might knowingly use historically
incorrect colors, as he knows the average person today would
consider authentic colors to be fake.

4
Art Perception * David Cycleback

5
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Art Perception
by David Cycleback

Hamerweit Books
ISBN : 978-1-312-11749-5
© 2014 david rudd cycleback

6
Art Perception * David Cycleback

7
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Contents
1 Introduction
in general cognition and perception
2 Conceits
3 Useful conceits
4 Human achievement
art perception
5 Art Conceits and the limits of communication
6 Art perception involves the irrational and psychological
7 Symbols
8 Each art medium is limited it what it can show literally
9 Humans know and feel there is more than what they see and can
comprehend, more than what they experience in their day to day
lives
10 Humans mentally adapt to and accept new and artificial worlds
11 Speculation, play acting, day and night dreams
12 The cognitive science of perception: introduction
13: Shape, patterns and form biases
14: Comparisons
15: Imagination
16: The ambiguity and imagination of language
17: Presenting works of art authentically
18: Focusing and Ignoring
19: Basic qualities and areas that evoke aesthetic and psychological
reactions
20: Night and day vision
21: Instant perception and uncorrectable illusions
22: Perception of movement
23: Narrative and the perception of still information
24: Values, culture and aesthetics in visual perception
25: What we see is different than what we look at: The Physiology
of seeing
26: The Illusion of depth in two dimensional art
27: The Subjective experience
28: Defining art
Examples of Aesthetics and Psychology in Non-Art Areas
29: Fiction in Science
30: Mirages
31: Numeral Systems and Psychology
32: Art Perception and the Limits of Human Knowledge

8
Art Perception * David Cycleback

9
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(1)
Introduction: Connecting to the unreal

A complex and fascinating question is why do humans have such

strong emotional reactions and human connections to unrealistic art
(and, for the record, all art differs from reality)? Why do viewers
become scared, even haunted for days, by a movie monster they
know doesn't exist? Why do humans become enthralled by distorted
figures and scenes that aren't realistic? Why do viewers have
emotional attachments to comic book characters?
The answers lie in that, while humans know art is human made
artifice, they decipher and view art using many of the same often
nonconscious methods that they use to decipher and view reality.
Looking at how we perceive reality shows us how we perceive art,
and looking at how we perceive art helps show us how we perceive
reality.

Art and aesthetic perception is a vast and complex topic and leads to
larger psychological and philosophical questions including about
the nature and reliability of the human mind and the limits of human
knowledge. This introductory book hardly intends to cover it all and
certainly doesn't offer simplistic overarching answers where there
are none (and there are none). Rather, this book offers up assorted
important concepts, factors, ideas and notes, and serves as a
springboard for further thought, discussion and reading. There are
still many mysteries about art and art perception and always will be.
You are welcome and encouraged to come up with your own
theories and ideas, connect the dots of this book in your own way.
Different people have different takes.

10
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

In General Cognition and Perception

Chapters 2 – 4 are a look at how humans think and

perceive in the general physical and mental worlds.
Understanding the curious ways the human mind works
in the non-art world is essential to understanding how it
works in the art world, as the same methods are used in
both.

11
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(2)
General Cognition and Perception
Conceits
For this chapter and book a conceit is defined as a false, artificial,
arbitrary, contrived and/or overly simplified rule or set of rules used
to explain the way things are or the way they are supposed to be. A
conceit is often made to give an answer where the real answer is
unknown or to give a simple, convenient answer to a complex
situation.

****

A Victorian England book of etiquette stated that on a bookshelf a

book by a male author should never be placed next to a book by a
female author. The exception was when the authors were married to
each other.

****

A wealthy American businessman and amateur historian decided to

build a duplicate of an Ancient Greek pillar on his ranch. His
expressed intent was to make it as historically accurate as possible,
down to the smallest known detail. Partway through the construction
scholars discovered that the Ancient Greeks had painted the original
pillar a bright light blue. The businessman was taken aback at this
finding. All the pillars he had seen in person and depicted in books
were unpainted. Painting one of those beautiful stoic pillars a bright
color bordered on the distasteful, like following a fine meal with
lime jello and cool whip. The businessman built the pillar exact in
all known details except it was unpainted.

****

12
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The human being lives in a universe that is mostly beyond its

knowledge and comprehension.
None of us knows the volume of the universe, the complete
inner workings of our own minds, what birds really think or what it's
like to be in someone else's shoes. We can speculate, we can
conjecture, we can theorize, but we don't know for certain.
It's fair to assume Albert Einstein would have said there were
many areas of science he knew little about. Just because you are a
famous nuclear physicist on the cover of Time magazine doesn't
make you a wiz at biology, veterinary science, economics, geology,
forestry and television repair.

****

While humans know little about the universe, they have an innate
psychological need for answers and order. Most of us want to know
the meaning of the universe and what is our purpose on earth.

****

In an attempt to overcome their lack of knowledge and sate their

desires for order, human beings create pseudo answers and artificial
order. This is most commonly done with conceits.

****

The following are examples of conceits:

* The sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. (The
sun does not rise and fall. This is a visual illusion caused
by humans’ position on the surface of a rotating earth.)
* Baby boys should wear blue, baby girls should wear pink.
* When men greet they must shake hands.
* A painting should be framed and hung from the wall. You
should not display it on a tabletop or leaned against a wall.
* A Gothic novel must have dark, stormy weather and a
castle or mansion.
* It is uncouth to drink wine out of a coffee cup or beer stein.
Wine must be drunk from a wine glass.

13
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

* A properly set table must have, from left to right, fork on

napkin, plate, knife, spoon and drinking glass. A table set
another way is set incorrectly.
* A cowboy movie has to take place in a dusty hot place like
in Arizona or Texas. If it takes place in Maine, it's not a
cowboy movie.
* There is great significance in 10 year (decade) and 100
year (century) increments. Nine, 11 or 98 year durations
are of lesser importance.

****

Conceits are used in all facets of our lives. From the fashion rules
for the shoes we wear to how we describe the universe to our
children. From the way a house is supposed to be decorated to how
music is supposed to sound. From the ways we conceptualize the
unknown to the required color for artificial turf in a sports stadium. I
hate to break it to you sports fans, but there's no practical reason
artificial turf can't be blue, purple, grey, red, black or white.
A conceit can be said and unsaid, conscious and nonconscious,
innate and learned, known and unknown. In cases it is a set of rules
posted on a sign. In other cases it is a gut reaction ('That's just the
way it's supposed to be').
Conceits can be trivial ('pencils always go to the right of the
pens on my desk') to large (religious, political or philosophical
beliefs requiring a leap of faith).
One's conceits can be idiosyncratic or widely held (custom).
Many of one's conceits change and develop with time and
experiences.

****

Bugs are icky.

For a romantic evening, you need soft music and candlelight.
You must dress up to go to the opera.
Your socks should match in color and pattern.

****

The human is wired to interpret its environment in the form of

14
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

conceits. The human's environment is so complex, the human

constantly bombarded with so much internal and external
information, the human uses conceits to create an understandable
translation.
Someone who claims to have no conceits has pointed out she
has an additional one.

****

Anyone who doesn't believe in the prevalence of conceits should go

to a mall or busy downtown street and observe the variety of
fashions. And, perhaps more important, observe how he or she
reacts to the fashions ('Damn hippie,' 'Must be a Republican,'
'Honey, hide your purse.').

****

For just one day try to live without conceits. No prejudice, no

preconceptions, no traditions, no fashion, no habits, no arbitrary
choices, no simplified answers to complicated situations, no made
up answer when the real answer is unknown, no doing something
'because that's the way I always do it.'
Realize that exchanging one conceit for another is not ridding
you of conceits.
If you can't live without conceits for a day, try it for a partial
day, try it for an hour, try it for five minutes. Time yourself with
your stopwatch.
Of course, hours, minutes and seconds are arbitrary markings of
time.

****

Why is pink so associated with girls and sissies? Is there something

inherent about the color, similar to the biological attraction of
hummingbirds to brightly colored flowers? Or is it mostly a matter
of tradition? If 100 years ago the tradition started that girls wore
dark blue, would tough guys today wear pink sweatshirts taunting
the guys who wore blue?

****

15
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

What is the hair color of your dream lover?

****

If you had to eat maggots and there was no health or taste concern
would you rather they were cooked or live? Why?

****

In a dating relationship would you feel uncomfortable if the woman

were much taller than the man? Why?

****

Manipulating information
We all purposely limit the amount of information we receive. It's a
normal, daily occurrence. The human being doesn't have the mental
ability to process everything at once, and must pick and chose what
it focuses on.
"Can we discuss this later? I'm busy right now and don't want
to lose my concentration."
"Don't anyone tell me the score of last night's game. I had to
work and recorded the game so I can watch it tonight."
"Honey, pull the shades. I don't even want to know what the
neighbors are doing this time."
"I'm not going to the Doctor, because I don't want to know if
there's something wrong with me."
"I'll look at my bank statement on Monday morning. This is
the weekend and I want to enjoy myself."
"They're my parents for God’s sake. I don't want to hear about
their love life."

****

Tricking Yourself
It is probably no surprise to hear that humans trick or otherwise
manipulate each other .... Embellishing one's job position to impress
the future in-laws .... Psyching out your opponent at the big ping

16
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

pong tournament .... Tricking your sibling out of the last donut
Humans also trick or otherwise manipulate themselves. Many
of the following examples are closely related to the previous limiting
information examples.
"Honey, hide the bag of Doritos. You know I can't help
myself if they're lying around."
"If I buy myself a new power suit, I will have confidence
for the meeting."
"I'm going to turn my watch ten minutes ahead so I'm not
always so late to meetings."
"I'm going to force myself not to think about her. Maybe
that will help heal my broken heart."
Give two examples of how you trick or manipulate yourself.

****

Keeping Up Appearances
We all superficially dress up facts to suit our tastes. Even if we
know the meaning remains the same, outer appearances are
important.
"I'm not a secretary, I'm an administrative assistant."
"Don't call it a toilet. That's crass. It's a rest room."
"I didn't get a pay raise, better office or the other things I
wanted, but I did convince the boss to change my title.
You're looking at the new assistant director for data
processing. I can't wait to phone mom. She'll be so proud."
"Don't say 'damn.' Say 'darn.'”

What euphemisms do you use?

****

Choosing to pay for what is free

I used to write an email newsletter about collectables. While it had
wide readership and received positive feedback, it was nearly
impossible to get any donations of time or money to support it. I had
planned on having a series of articles on collecting wirephotos--
identification, dating, valuation. Before I was able to include the

17
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

series, I decided I had enough of doing the newsletter for free and
ended it. With the newsletter finished, I computer printed the
wirephotos articles into a Spartan 35 page booklet and offered it for
sale for about $7 a copy. Within the first week and a half I made
more money from that little booklet than I had received in donations
in over two years of publishing the newsletter. Because of their bias
about how information should be disseminated (physically printed
versus email), the readers chose to pay for information they would
have received for free. Not that I was complaining.

****

Biases
Most conceits are based on biases. People's views of the world and
even of facts are affected by biases.
A bias is a strong preference for or against something for
reasons that do not have a rational basis. A bias can be identified
when someone is offered the choice of items that are identical
except for one subjective quality (color, shape, scent), and the
person consistently picks a particular item because of the subjective
quality.
Each morning five shirts are laid out on your bed. The shirts are
identical other than in color. If you only or usually pick the blue
shirt, you have a bias towards blue, at least as far as the shirts go.
If over time you wear all the shirts except the yellow, you have a
bias against yellow shirts.
We all have a range of biases. We all have prejudices (meaning,
making judgments before all the facts are in, or jumping to
conclusions) and predilections (a strong liking or disliking of
something based on temperament or prior experience).
While the word bias often has a derogatory connotation, many
biases are worthwhile and even helpful. We all have personal
preferences that are positive influences on our lives. I feel no need
to apologize for preferring Chinese food over Italian, Rachmaninov
over Brahms or having a favorite color of blue. No one should run to
the confessional because she dislikes watching basketball and loves
to wear pearl earrings. Life would be boring without personal
preferences.
The problems arise when biases prevent us from being able to
make what should be or we represent as rational judgments. Many

18
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

of our biases make us jump to false conclusions. Many of our biases

cloud what should be clear vision. Many people’s biases prevent
them from seeing the truth right in front of their eyes.
When there is the latest political scandal, do you in part judge
the guilt or innocence based on the accused's political
affiliation? Are you more likely to suspect him guilty if he is a
member of the other party? If he shares your political beliefs,
are you more likely to ascribe the accusations to being partisan
attacks?
In the news there are all those latest health findings on what's
good for you and what's bad for you: drink this amount of wine
weekly, eat this, avoid that, get this amount of exercise. When
first hearing the latest health finding, do you in part judge the
scientific validity of the report based on how it relates to your
lifestyle? If you love red meat are you more likely to accept at
face value a report claiming the benefits of red meat and
dismiss a report claiming that red meat should removed from
one's diet?
When an important medical report is given to the public on
television, do you in part judge the validity of the report based
on what the doctor is wearing and from where he is presenting
the findings? Even if the report is the same, would you give
more credence if the doctor is wearing a white lab coat and
stethoscope and speaking from a laboratory (test tubes, vials,
scientific charts in the background), as opposed to if he is
wearing jeans and a well worn T-shirt and speaking from a
junky park bench? Why do you think makers of commercials
hawking that fad diet or libido pill use actors dressed like
doctors in white lab coats?
Many biases are subtle, many are genetic. If we were born cats,
we'd have different priorities, different ways of looking at things.
We have habits we don't know exist until pointed out by others.
Movie makers know that lighting, camera angle and music
influences the movie-goers’ opinions of the characters.

****

Many people complain that a news organization is biased. Most of

these people are not looking for unbiased reporting, but reporting
with a different bias (theirs).

19
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

Killing cockroaches
The traditional way to kill cockroaches is by taking a can of bug
spray and spraying the offending creatures. Years back a company
invented a different way for killing cockroaches. Instead of directly
spraying the bugs, this company had a new disc that was discreetly
placed out of sight-- under a bed or refrigerator, the back of a closet.
This disc was more effective than the spray can-- meaning, it killed
more bugs. The company test marketed the product with inner city
single mothers who had cockroach problems in their homes and
used bug spray. The mothers were shown how the disc worked and
informed it would kill more cockroaches. When polled afterwards,
the majority of the women said they would not purchase the disc, as
spraying the cockroaches gave them a sense of control.

****

Learning from experience

Former US President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al

Gore at a 1997 Press Conference

Much of how the human being sees, interprets and reacts is based
on past experience. Both consciously and nonconsciously we use
past experience to show us the way things are. Sometimes we learn

20
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

from repeated experiences, sometimes from a single experience,

sometimes from what others tell us.
Most of us have learned not to put our hands on a red burner on
the stove because of personal experience (ouch!) or because we
were taught. We learn how to identify plants and animals through
experience. Many people love to go up and smell roses because they
know what roses smelled like before.
Through repetition, or even single experience, many things
become second nature. We barely have to be conscious of them. It's
raining, reach for the umbrella. If a burner is bright red, don't touch
it. Rabbits are soft and sidewalks are hard. Jiggle the handle on the
upstairs toilet or the toilet will run all night. Alligators are
dangerous. Chocolate is sweet. Salty and fatty foods are bad for you.
Grass is green and beaches are sandy.
Our nonconscious minds and bodies learn from experience—
depth perception, reacting to gravity, balance. Athletes perfect their
skills through practice. By repeating shots and moves, the moves
become second nature to the basketball player. Through practice the
gymnast gains balance and muscle memory. Juggling and cycling
becomes second nature with practice.
Not only do humans learn from precedent, they gain
psychological and even physical attachment to what they have
learned. This is part of how habits become second nature. If
someone was bit by a large dog as a kid she may shake with fear
when a large dog approaches her on the street. If someone had
childhood vacations at his favorite aunt and uncle’s cabin near the
beach, he may get a warm feeling when he sees a magazine picture
of a similar beach.
This psychological aspect can be helpful. The practical use of
the gut reactions should be apparent in the following: instant fear
when a Grizzly crosses your path, uneasy feeling and perhaps even
nausea towards a piece of a meat that smells funny and has a strange
color, a warm feeling towards someone who gave you a fair shake
when no one else would.
The problem is that no matter how seemingly logical or natural
or how deep we feel it in our bones, what we learn as correct is not
always correct. Often it's dead wrong. Scientists would laugh at
laboratory conclusions based on an arbitrary example or hearsay. Yet
this is how we learn in everyday life.
Even your eyes can lie. If you don't believe me, take a second

21
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

look at the earlier picture. It is not of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Both
are Bill Clinton, but one has different hair. Your brain and eyes were
in the habit of seeing things a certain way.
Visual illusions illustrate that even our brains have conceits
about the way things are. Look at the images on the following four
pages.

Spiral

What may appear to be a spiral is a series of circles. If you carefully

trace your finger along a circle, you will see this.

22
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

tilted lines

Despite appearance, all the columns are of equal width and

parallel to each other.

23
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

warped circle

Despite appearance, the above circle is perfectly round. It is

the overlapping lines that make it appear warped.

24
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Greta Garbo in hat and coat

There is no illusion with this picture other than caused by your

expectation that there was one. It's just a picture of Greta Garbo
wearing a hat and coat. You must admit it's interesting that after only
several images you created a new (and false) logic. You started a
minute ago interpreting as true a false image (Clinton) and ended up
with interpreting as false a true image. Fascinating.

****

Absolute statements
Scrutiny reveals the fallacies in our sweeping, absolute statements
about society or life or politics or art or sports or television
programming.

25
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

A liberal mayor may proclaim from the podium, "I am against all
forms of racial bias" yet supports racial quotas for school
admissions and government contacts. Shouldn't he really say, "I
am against all forms of racial bias, except for the areas where I
support racial bias"?
A conservative states' rights US Senator may proclaim, "I am for
states' rights and against the national government imposing their
will on states," then blocks a state from enacting a law he
dislikes. Shouldn't the statement more accurately have been, "I
am for states' rights and against national government imposing
their will on states, except for where I'm not for states’ rights and
am for national government imposing their will on states"?
Looking closely you will discover that most sweeping absolute
statements are not about the person attempting to be factually
accurate, but trying to gain power relative to someone or something
else. They are rhetorical flourishes. When a brother yells at his kid
brother, "You always ruin everything!," he knows the statement is
not accurate. However in the middle of a sibling fight the statement
"You do many things quite well and mom says you got a B+ on you
last French quiz which is quite commendable, but you do mess up a
percentage of things on various occasions" doesn't pack the in the
heat of the moment punch.

****

When their sports teams clearly are not number one, why do college
fans and cheerleaders raise their index fingers and yell "We're
number one!"?
Notice this is done in the heat of the moment. During Tuesday
morning physics class the student likely won't claim the school's 1-6
basketball team is the best in the nation. However, when you point a
television camera on him and his friends during Saturday's game out
comes the number one sign.

****

Psychological ties
The human being is an emotional animal ... love, hate, romantic
attachment, embarrassment, repulsion, giddiness .... This is part of
who we are and how we interpret the world. Emotional
interpretation is often more important to humans than facts.

26
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Emotions regularly override or temper facts. And who's to say it's

always a bad thing. Sticking by family through thick and thin isn't a
bad rule of thumb.
For humans it is difficult and often impossible to separate
meaning from emotion, facts from emotion, worth from emotion.
What is right is supposed to feel right. Religious faith involves an
emotional attachment to the ideas. There is an emotional connection
to the art we love. If there wasn't a psychological reaction to the
actors on the screen and their story who would pay good money to
sit in the dark theatre for two hours?
No matter how well plotted and witty the dialogue, a movie or
novel is deemed unworthy if it doesn't move the critic. "It simply
didn't move me" or "I didn't connect with the characters" is
considered appropriate critical judgment to be a newspaper critic.
Even the most logical of people judge facts by their aesthetic
appearance. An M.I.T. engineering professor will spend hours
contemplating what picture and background color should be on his
upcoming textbook. He may have a fit if the publisher says the book
cover will be hot pink.
A mathematics professor may write and rewrite her equations
so they are unsmudged, parallel to the top and bottom of the paper
and with attractive margins. Even when the answers are correct, she
may reject students’ homework that is not similarly neat.
Emotional reactions or states can be good and bad. Most would
agree that love for your children, leading you to look out for the best
interests, is good. Most would agree that getting a warm feeling
from kicking friendly dogs is not good.
Emotional states can alter out landscapes. When we are head
over heels in love, a drizzly gray day is gorgeous. When we are
unrequited, a rainbow can weigh like lead in the heart.
Mood is an integral part of how we plan our lives ... Getting the
mood right for a romantic evening ... Decorating the apartment to
make you feel at home after a long day at work.

****

Sanity and Custom

People tend to believe that sanity and insanity are absolute,
objective terms, with a medical doctor saying a patient is insane as
she would say a patient has a broken arm or skin cancer. The

27
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

popular and legal definitions of sanity and insanity are based on that
society's customs and even fashion. No matter what it is, if enough
people are doing it it won't be considered insane behavior.
If you don't believe this, examine what currently socially
acceptable behavior would be deemed bizarre, if not psychotic, if no
one else in society did them.
* Decorative body mutilation, such as piercing one's ears and
getting a tattoo
* Lying in the sun with the expressed intention of turning brown
* Taxidermy
* Wearing makeup and styling and coloring one's hair
* Taking an animal as a pet, giving it a name, walking it around
the neighborhood on a leash and telling people it's the new
member of the family
* Expecting people to shake your outstretched hand when you
meet, and acting slighted by those who don’t
* Manicuring one's lawn and garden, including cutting the shrubs
into shapes
If you did all of these, and they were not done by anyone else,
you would be considered mentally ill and in need of serious medical
help.

****

Given once a year to a single college football player, the Heisman

Trophy is the most famous sports trophy in the United States.
Unknown to each other, two former Heisman Trophy winners and
their families lived in the same neighborhood. One afternoon, one of
the men's sons came home disappointed in his dad. His dad had
always told him how rare was the Heisman Trophy on the living
room mantle, but the dad of the kid down the street had the same
trophy.

****

New environments
The BaMbuti Pygmies of Congo traditionally live their entire lives
in the dense rainforest, where the furthest away anyone can see is

28
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

feet. They learned, loved, played and hunted in this environment. In

his 1961 book The Forrest People (Touchstone), anthropologist
Colin Turnbull wrote how he took one of these Pygmies, named
Kenge, for his first time to a wide open plain. As the two stood on a
hill overlooking the flat land, a group of water buffalo was seen a
few miles away. Having no experience of how things appear smaller
over long distance, Kenge asked what kind of insects they were.
Turnbull told him they were buffalo and Kenge laughed loudly at
the “stupid story.” Turnbull drove Kenge towards the buffalo.
Watching the animals growing visually larger, Kenge became scared
and said it was witchcraft.
Human beings develop an idiosyncratic logic and sensibility
distinct to the environment where they were brought up. The
environment one grows up in is seemingly the world. A kid born and
raised in the inner city versus the country, rich versus poor, in Cairo
versus Chicago, conservative family versus liberal, woods versus
desert. The person who has lived her whole life in Portland or Cairo
may get a chuckle at that story about the Pygmy then dismiss the
idea that a similar incongruity could exist with her native logic.
As Kenge interpreted the open expanse based on his jungle
experience, humans interpret such esoteric and largely unfathomable
things as the afterlife and the meaning of the universe based on their
limited experience. It should not be surprising that common human
interpretation of the supernatural largely has an earthly sensibility.
The supernatural beings often dress like humans, live in night and
day, drink and eat human-style meals, speak and read and write, play
human-style instruments and games, and even sneeze. It should not
be a surprise that to the Ancient Egyptians the gods dressed like
Egyptians and to the Ancient Greeks the gods dressed like Greeks.

****

John Nash's Aliens

John Nash is a famed mathematician and winner of the 1994 Nobel
Prize for Economics who was paranoid schizophrenic. While an
instructor at M.I.T. and Princeton, Nash suffered severe mental
episodes and dropped out of society. He began hallucinating,
hearing voices in his head. In this state he deduced that aliens were
talking to him.
To most of us his conclusion seems loopy. It does reveal how

29
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

the human mind works. In a situation well beyond his experience he

wanted a concrete answer for what was happening. While bizarre,
the aliens conclusion 'logically' matched his illogical situation. It is
abnormal to hear voices in one's head so, when one starts hearing
voices, normal everyday answers will not explain. It can be expected
that someone will explain the abnormal with an abnormal answer,
especially when he is in a confused mental state. It is likely no
coincidence that Nash nonconsciously picked a conceit that was part
of popular culture.
Years later when he had largely recovered from his mental
problems, Nash was asked how he had come to the conclusion that
aliens were talking to him. He said that he came to conclusion in the
same intuitive way that he came to the mathematical conclusions
that won him the Nobel Prize.

30
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Which black rectangle is larger?

The two black rectangles are the same size. Measure

them yourself. It is your lifelong experience with
diminishing scales in open spaces that caused you to
perceive the upper rectangle as larger. Kenge would
not have been fooled by this illusion.

31
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(3)
General Cognition and Perception
Useful conceits
While conceits have inherent limitations and pitfalls, many have
practical uses and we couldn’t function without them. The following
are just a few examples.

* While having a law that requires automobiles to drive on

the right instead of the left side of the road involves
arbitrariness, the usefulness of the law should be clear.
This is a case where the powers that be had to pick one
side or the other, perhaps flipping a coin. In Britain the
coin must have fallen differently.
* Before I go to bed, I make sure my keys are placed in the
middle of the kitchen table. I came up with this rule after
several hectic mornings looking for the damn things.
* Standard games and sports require arbitrary rules to work.
Whether an American football field is supposed to be 95,
100 or 105 yards long, you have to pick a length so it is
known when someone has scored a touchdown ...
Whether a basketball field goal layup counts as 1, 2, 4, 5
or other points, you have to pick an amount before the
game starts ... For a tennis match and soccer game, it has
to be agreed upon whether on-the-line is in bounds or out
of bounds.
* One of the most important uses of conceits is they can
save us time. Your pre-set rules for clothes you put on in
the morning involve personal biases and arbitrary
choices. However, without these and other trite rules
you might be unable to leave your house before 4 p.m.

32
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

This would be a problem if your job starts and 9 a.m. and

you're supposed to pick of your kids from kindergarten at
3 p.m.
****

Many conceits don't have practical uses, but are harmless feel
goods. Sometimes feeling good is practical, such as when your
doctor has suggested you lower your blood pressure.
* If you grew up dreaming your house would have a white
picket fence and a big oak tree, there's nothing wrong with
putting up a white picket fence and planting an oak tree on the
land you bought.
* If you just bought a sports car and think that it should have
bold racing stripes, there's nothing wrong with asking the dealer
to add bold racing stripes.
* If you need the theatre effect to enjoy a movie and set up
your entertainment room in the basement to look like a movie
theatre with theatre seats and a popcorn machine, that sounds
cool to me.

33
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(4)
General Cognition and Perception
Conceits and human achievement
Humans use conceits, biases and imaginary environments to reach
higher levels of achievement. This achievement can range from a
musician composing a great symphony to a ten year old improving
her math scores.
Humans do not have the capacity to effectively focus on a
variety of tasks simultaneously. To reach higher levels of
achievement in an area, the human must put most to all of its focus
on that area. Humans must eliminate or stabilize (make a non factor)
areas that distract from the needed focus.
This is comparable to a water kettle with four equal sized holes
in the top. When water is boiled inside, steam will raise a height
from the holes. If three of the holes are sealed, the steam will rise
much higher from the remaining hole.

****

The following are everyday examples of manipulating one’s mental

and physical environment to produce achievement:
* While background music or others’ chitchat may be fine while
browsing a glossy magazine, many of us cover our ears in
order to comprehend a difficult passage or perform a math
problem.
* To expand one’s mind by meditation someone focuses on a
repeated mundane and often arbitrary task, such as following
one’s breath or repeating a word.
* To improve the team’s horrid free throw percentage, the junior
high basketball coach teaches the players to focus on the
basket and their shooting motion and to ignore the crowd. He
has them practice by ignoring recorded crowd noise and
cardboard cutouts of fans.

34
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

* Many with a fear of speaking reduce their nervousness by

imagining the audience wearing only their underwear. They
create a fantasy.

****

The Rituals of Baseball

Many consider hitting a baseball to be the most difficult feat in
sport. The batter swings a stick to hit a small ball. The thrown ball
can reach speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Early 1900s player Ty
Cobb holds the record for the highest career batting average in
Major League Baseball history. His batting average was 0.367, or
3.67 hits per every 10 turns at bat. Even the greatest hitters fail more
than they succeeded. Enough to give anyone a complex.

Ty Cobb at bat in 1908

Baseball hitters, and baseball players in general, are notorious

for their strange conceits. Players often wear the same unwashed
undershirt and socks during a hitting streak. Most players don’t step
on the white foul lines when entering and leaving the field. Pitcher
Turk Wendell waved to left field every time he entered and left a
game. When coming to bat, Nomar Garciaparra went through a well
documented ritual of pulling at his shirt, opening and closing the
Velcro straps on his batting gloves and tapping the toes of his shoes.
Lucky charms, bracelets, necklaces, gum brands abound the game.
Five time batting champion Wade Boggs ate chicken before every
game. U.L. Washington batted with a toothpick in his mouth. After
parents complained that kids might emulate the unsafe habit, he

35
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

switched to a q-tip. After the first slump, U.L. was back to the
toothpick.
Though many of the rituals are comical, they can aid
performance. Hitting requires a calm and focused mind and
exceptional mind body coordination, all while the player is
surrounded by television cameras, screaming fans and the other
pressures of being a professional athlete expected to perform. If
wearing the lucky undershirt or repeating an odd ritual eases the
batter’s mind and gives confidence, it can increase the player’s
batting average. U.L.’s reason for switching back to a toothpick was
because it made him feel more comfortable. While a toothpick as aid
may seem nonsensical, the desire to be comfortable makes sense.

****

Faith
For a conceit to aid performance, the person must have faith in the
conceit.
During a meditation session, one must accept that the thing of
mental focus is worthy (breath, mantra, stone, other). Whether the
thing was carefully chosen by an instructor or picked in a rush (a
pebble hastily grabbed from the ground), meditation requires you to
focus on that thing. If you fret about whether or not the mantra was
the perfect pick, this very fretting makes the meditation session less
effective.
The lucky blue undershirt only helps the baseball player if he
believes it lucky. If the blue undershirt is deemed lucky because he
had a great game the first time he wore it, this illustrates the
arbitrariness in conceits. If before that big game he pulled his grey
undershirt from the drawer, it likely would be the grey undershirt
that is considered lucky.

****

Positive achievement is regularly based on false beliefs

There are regular cases where positive achievement is achieved
from a false belief. This includes in your daily life. Believing the
false, if only temporarily, is a technique we all use to remove
distracting thoughts. The following are two examples.
* A placebo helps when the patient falsely believes it is medicine.

36
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

When the patient knows what it is, a placebo doesn’t help.

* A freshman at the University of Georgia, Jessica is entering final
exam week before winter break. Unknown to her, her beloved
14 year old cat Tiger just died back home in Savannah. The
night before her first test she has her weekly telephone
conversation with her parents back home. Jessica asks how
Tiger is doing. Her mother says Tiger is doing just fine, adding
that the cat is playing with a toy on the couch. After hanging up,
Jessica’s mother feels bad about lying, but thinks it was best
considering the exams. After a productive week, Jessica takes a
bus home to Savannah where her parents break the bad news
and explain why they delayed it. Jessica understands, agreeing
that the news would have distracted her from her studies.

In both these cases it was a false belief that led to the desired
achievement. In both cases, knowledge of the truth would have
hindered the achievement.
This shows that positive achievement arising from a belief is
not proof that the belief is correct.
Patients who get better after taking a placebo often swear the
pills had to be medicine. To them, getting better is the proof. Even
when the doctor informs them it was a placebo, some patients
continue to believe it was medicine because they got better.
A sincere faith involves a psychological, often irrational
attachment to the ideas. This psychological aspect is both what helps
the placebo-taking patient get better (Most doctors believe positive
‘I am getting better’ thinking aids recovery) and what prevents him
from accepting his belief as false even when confronted with the
facts. This psychological attachment has both a positive and a
negative result.

****

This points to the fascinating relationship humans have with facts. A

human cannot function as it desires without the distortion and
suppression of facts.
Even a search for the truth requires false beliefs to focus mental
attention. In other words, a search for the truth requires lies.

37
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

Olympic psychology
For world class Olympic athletes a common rule is that one must
believe one is going to win in order to win. Paraphrasing a top speed
skater interviewed the day before an Olympic race, “You shouldn’t
just think you will win, you must know you will win.” In a track,
swim or bike race, the difference between first and fourth may be a
fraction of a second, and the winning psychology can mean the
difference between a win and loss. Of course most of these athletes
who are sure they will win will not win, and those who win do not
win every time. Even when the belief turns out to be wrong, it may
better the athlete from, say, fifth to third or third to second.

****

Whether the idolized is a sports coach, historical leader or artist,

most worshipers of a human being worship an unreal representation.
Much of the misrepresentation is intentional, followers embellishing
good qualities and glossing over bad.
At first it seems strange that groups intentionally misrepresent
the person they supposedly idolize. However, similar to sweeping
absolute statements mentioned in the first chapter, the
representations aren't about complete factual accuracy. Amongst
other things, they are concerned with gaining and maintaining
members' loyalty and spirit, group self importance and gaining
power versus other groups. The word idolizes implies the act of
changing, changing something into an idol.
It should not surprise that during a political election supporters
put their candidate in the best light and their competitor in the worst.
Their representation isn't about truth, it's about winning the election.
If you ask either campaign manager why he doesn't include bad
facts about his candidate in the campaign literature, he'll look at you
as if you are crazy.

38
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Chapter 4 showed how false beliefs can lead to productive

practical results and how practical results do not prove that
the underlying beliefs are correct. Do you believe that the
fiction and make believe of art can produce results where
telling the truth would not? For example, can fiction be a
better way to teach people important ideas and concepts?
People sometimes say “To illustrate my point, let me give
you a theoretical example.”

39
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Depicting Jesus Christ in Art

Beyond the West's blue eyed dishwater blonde version, it has

long been common for Jesus Christ to be depicted in art as
looking like the local people. The old Ethiopian art on the upper
right shows him as black. The Chinese painting on the left shows
him as Asian in Asian dress. Of course, the real Jesus probably
looked like none of these three depictions.

40
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(5)
Artistic conceits and
limits in communication

An art form (novel, rock song, painting, poem, movie) is a form of

language. The artist uses an art form as a means to communicate an
idea or ideas to the audience. I use the word idea in a broad sense,
ranging from factual idea to emotional state. I use the term audience
to mean whoever is watching the movie, reading the book, listening
to the music or viewing the painting. An audience can be one
million and it can be one.
To be art a work must be profoundly beautiful or sublime to the
audience. It must give an audience a sublime or deeply beautiful
experience. Beauty and sublime cannot be translated into simple
words, so I do not define them here.

****

Not only is an art form made up and surrounded by a maze of

conceits, but each form is itself a conceit. This means that art has

41
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

both the practical benefits and the inherent limitations of all

conceits.
An artistic conceit can be deep, trivial, traditional, ephemeral,
regional, worldwide, conflicting and so on.

****

The follow are examples of artistic conceits. Notice that some aren't
about the art itself but how the art is presented.
* The way a country music song is supposed to sound. What
instruments are supposed to be used and what instruments
should not be used. How the musicians should dress and
move in a music video. What topics the lyrics should cover.
What topics the lyrics should not cover.
* Don't tell me that you or others don't judge a book by its
cover. If the cover for a tough guy American football star's
autobiography was changed from dark blue to pink, it would
affect sales even though the text remained the same.
* Say the Chicago Symphony comes to town and offers
wonderful performances of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and
Haydn's Water Music. Many in the audience, including
perhaps the local newspaper critic, will be unable to get
beyond the fact that the orchestra dressed overly casual. The
director in tank top and cutoff jeans. The lead violinist in
bathrobe and stocking feet. Some in the audience will
demand back their money, the newspaper critic might spend
half her review complaining about the musicians' clothes.
* The clichéd structure, chords, riffs, chorus-to-lead, ending
and starting styles, duration and other conceits of rock ‘n
roll songs. Upon analysis, you will find that singles by Pat
Boone, Black Flag, ABBA, Black Sabbath and John Denver
have far more in common than many of the respective fans
would be willing to admit.
* A movie must be about people or things that are people-
like. A movie about a birch tree would be a bomb. However,
you might sell some tickets if you have an animated birch
that can walk and talk, wears pants and a shirt, has a good
sense of humor and has romantic feelings for that spruce of
the opposite sex. If you stick in a car chase or two, an evil

42
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

woodsman and his bad tempered chainsaw who wants to

turn Mr. Birchy and all his tree pals into kindling, a fitting
musical score and a happy ending with the woodsman foiled
and Mr. Birchy and Miss Spruce smooching under a
rainbow with nearby supercute bunnies giggling, you might
have a blockbuster on your hands.
* When you go to an art museum, what should it look like
inside? What should it not look like? What would be your
reaction be if a show of Rembrandts had the original,
centuries old paintings displayed in funky neon green and
day glow yellow frames?
* In Western culture what art forms are generally considered
more artistically significant than others? Novel versus comic
book, oil painting versus finger painting, television show
versus in theatre movie, classical music versus rock 'n roll,
drama versus comedy, violin versus banjo? Why?

****

In order to effectively communicate the essential artistic meaning,

the artist must follow most of the audience's conceits. This not only
includes the deeper conceits but the shallow.
To have the audience focus on the intended meaning, the artist
must be faithful to, or at least take into consideration, most of the
audience's expectations. Breaking a convention is a shock, a
distraction. If the artist breaks all the conventions the audience will
be too distracted to focus on the meaning. If you turn a busy street
corner and a nude man painted orange and walking a deer in a
tuxedo asks you for directions to the library I bet you won't
comprehend the first sentence or two that comes out his mouth no
matter how clearly he speaks. Similarly, if you display a Rembrandt
painting in a hot pink and lime green fuzzy frame with flashing neon
lights and dangling felt dice, don't be surprised if the gallery patron
is unable to focus on the painting. If you want the patron to focus on
the painting, you use a frame that fits his or her expectations.

****

Artists intentionally bend or break some conventions while

43
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

following the others. They follow all the other conventions in order
to focus the audience's attentions on the intentionally bent or broken
convention. I dare you to find a popular shock rock band that, while
having a disturbing twist, does not follow the majority of
fashionable conceits, even those used by The Kingston Trio and
Sonny and Cher. What you intend to be shocking can't be shocking,
or its shock value will be diluted to water, if the audience's attention
is distracted by other things. Totally bewildering is rarely as
haunting as a perverse twist of the ordinary.
The juxtaposition of the unexpected with the expected, the
abnormal with the normal, is a common artistic technique. Many
movies spend the first portion of the work merely setting up an
artificial plot and setting to later subvert. How many monster
movies start as a normal everyday white picket story? How many
thrillers start as an everyday guy going about his everyday business?
The theme and variation is a standard musical technique--
altering the melody the second and third time around in a song or
other work of music. In comparison to the remembered theme, the
altered variation produces a psychological, sometimes poignant
effect for the listener. Music can be plotted in a surprisingly similar
way to a movie or novel.

****

No matter how shallow the conceits, the successful artist must use
or at least address most of the conceits of the audience. Successful
art is a compromise between the artist and the audience. It is a
communication and communication requires a common language.
The artist may have radical things to say, but must communicate in a
form the audience can understand. No matter how profound the
meaning, the novelist who ignores all the audience's expectations
and sensibilities might as well write the book in a foreign language.
Great artists are often keenly aware that much of their artistic vision
can never be communicated to others.

44
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

"And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great

explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land
from which he can never return to give his knowledge to
the world”
– Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm Lowry's Under the
Volcano

45
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Make a short list of artificial rules in art and entertainment,

including rules you like and don't like, rules that make sense
and rules that are silly or absurd. An example is most
movies are around 1-1/2 to 2-1/2 hours. That's not
necessarily a bad unofficial rule, as few of us would want to
sit through an eight hour movie.
Give one or two examples of artistic or entertainment
conceits that have changed over the years. Some may
reflect social changes.

46
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(6)
Art perception involves the
irrational and psychological

Even those who have never seen the 1922 silent vampire movie
Nosferatu get a psychological reaction from this still image. I
don't have to tell you that isn't the tooth fairy climbing the stairs.

One reason people connect to unrealistic art is people don't perceive

art, or for that matter reality, on the purely logical, rational or literal
levels. Art is designed to communicate psychologically,
aesthetically, sensually, viscerally, irrationally, subconsciously.
There is nothing logical in the aesthetic perception of instrumental
music. The sounds are felt. Beauty and ugliness are emotional
experiences. Unreal things, distorted figures, a fictional monster in a
movie can strike a visceral chord in us that our normal daily reality
can't. A computer generated science fiction landscape can be
perceived as beautiful.
As described more in a later chapter, humans have
subconscious reactions to many basic qualities including colors,
shapes, angles and balance, whether the qualities are in the real
world, dreams or art. These qualities don’t just symbolize feelings

47
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

and evoke meaning in nature, they symbolize and evoke in abstract

art and even your new bathroom design.

48
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

'To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's

about, but the music the words make.'
– Truman Capote

49
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(7)
Symbols
Symbols are an integral part of the human experience and
communication on many levels. A symbol is something that
represents something else, something larger. It is a short hand, often
to a complex idea. To many, blue at the top of an abstract painting
or kid’s sketch represents sky, and green at the bottom represents
grass or ground. A gold ring on the finger symbolizes marriage.
Not only can common symbols be used in art to communicate
ideas, meaning and mood, but this illustrates how humans don’t
need reality to communicate real ideas. Symbols literally aren’t the
thing they symbolize.
Literature, this paragraph you are reading, is a long series of
symbols. The meaning isn’t in the symbols themselves, but what
they evoke in your mind. I couldn’t communicate many of the ideas
in this book without these symbols. Someone who doesn't know the
code (English) can't know what is being written.

50
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The 1435 Jan Van Eyck painting 'The Arnolfini Wedding' contains
much symbolism. The holding of the hands shows the wedded
union, the faithful dog represents loyalty, the gender roles are
symbolized by the woman standing next to the bed. Do you see
any other symbols?

51
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The enigmatic Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch filled his

paintings with symbols. However, the meanings of these
symbols aren't fully known. Without knowing the symbolic
code, one can't know what he was trying to say.

52
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(8)
Each art medium is limited
in what it can show literally
Any form of communication or expression is limited. A painting or
sketch doesn't have physical depth or movement. A silent movie
doesn't have voices even when the people on screen converse. The
letters of a novel can't graphically show a sunrise. There is no such
thing as perfectly realistic art or art that wholly depicts its subject.
As with our own senses, art is distorted and limited in fundamental
ways.
This means a medium must use artificial devices to
communicate the literally undepictable. Through exposure,
audiences accept the devices, don't even think twice about them.

This movie has subtitles so English speakers know

what is being said.

53
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Comic strips use panels to depict the passage of time and letter
symbols and bubbles to depict talking.

The lines represent bouncing and the

'ball' itself is just a symbol of a ball

54
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Legendary Warner Bros. cartoonist Chuck Jones said

that to make his characters' cartoonish movements look
flowing and good in film, he had to unrealistically
distort and change the characters’ bodies and limbs still
image to still image. When Bugs Bunny was rubber
arm throwing a baseball his arm would change in length
and shape still image to still image. He said that after
seeing what he was doing, a studio executive with no
animation experienced made the new rule that the
animators couldn't make such distortions. He thought
such distortions were unseemly and somehow unethical.

55
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(9)
Humans know and feel there is more than
what they see and can comprehend, more
than what they experience in their day to
day lives
Humans know people in a society hide their true thoughts and
feelings. They know they themselves have feelings and ideas that
can't be put into words. They know there are real concepts they can
only imagine about.
The unrealistic, the impossible, the surreal, symbolism can evoke
that which realistic art and our daily lives don't. Abstract patterns
and wordless music can evoke secret memories, emotions and
philosophical ideas that a photograph or neighborly chat cannot.

A 'photorealistic' snapshot of a posed family can reveal little

about what the subjects really think and feel, while an
expressionist painting can tell a lot. Expressionism intended to
express psychological reality rather than physical reality. The
artists believed both couldn't be shown at the same time.

56
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The silent 1920 German expressionist film Cabinet of Doctor

Caligari used surreal sets to depict themes of insanity, dreams and
evil.

****

Artists intentionally subvert logic, reason, objectivity and reality to

produce the desired psychological effect in the audience.
Many paintings intentionally distort reality. Look at paintings by
Picasso, Dali, Cezanne, Jackson Pollock and Renoir. Even the
'realistic' paintings of the 1300s have impossible dimensions, odd
looking humans and made up visual stories. Classic movies and
novels have unreal plots, characters, timing and effects. Some are
fairy tales and some are science fiction.
To produce the desired emotions in the audience most movies
have music sound tracks. In real life many of the scenes portrayed
would have no full symphonic accompaniment. Washington crossing
the Delaware, man lost alone in the middle of the desert, Humphrey
Bogart walking a deserted street, bear fight. Most movie music is a
calculated distortion of reality for psychological purposes. Isn’t there
something bizarre about musical accompaniment for a National
Geographic documentary about insects? What does synthesizer or

57
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

orchestral arrangement have to do with ants? The answer is it has

nothing to do with ants, and everything to do with the human
psychology.
Art is so different than the physical world that its truth is
derived from lies. Shakespeare's Hamlet is made up. Of Mice and
Men is a figment of John Steinbeck's imagination.
Pablo Picasso said, “Art is the lie that brings us closer to the
truth.”

58
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

( 10 )
Humans mentally adapt to and
accept new and artificial worlds
Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrated how throughout our lives we learn
new games, rules, languages, rituals, manners, fashion, ways of
thinking. In art, we accept and adopt new musical styles, symbols,
genres, conceits, artifices. Through repetition and experience,
artistic symbols, conceits and associations become more than
convenient intellectual devices. They seem natural. We object
when the arbitrary but traditional rules of a television sit com are
broken.
Our perception of reality is formed by the conceits of art.
People around the world perceive the Old West from Hollywood
movies, even though historians will tell you those depictions are
historically inaccurate. People gain dubious perceptions of faraway
places and peoples from sitcoms and action movies.
While it leads to errors and delusional thinking, being able to
psychologically adapt to new rules and environments is essential for
the survival and thriving of the human race. Humans are the most
adaptive animal, being able to live in places from Africa to Siberia.
Learning to do things quickly, seemingly instinctively, is important
for making the quick decisions required to survive and thrive. As
with many qualities humans, the ability to mentally adapt to new
situations has both positives and negatives.

59
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Did you know?

Sculpture is often a commentary on or response

to previous sculpture, so to understand sculpture
one has to know the history.

60
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

( 11 )
Speculation, play acting,
day and night dreams

All humans speculate about the past, present and future, things that
haven’t happen, things could have happened, things that might have
happened. People wonder what their life would have be like if they
were born in a different family or time and place or with different
looks. Someone wonders how the conversation would have gone
differently if he hadn't made that stupid remark. A woman may
wonder what dress will go across best at tonight's party. People
ponder when they will die, what their life will be like in the future.
People wonder it's like to visit Iceland or live in Paris. Speculation
is an essential part of human intelligence. Great inventions and
human achievements arise from speculation.
Humans day dream, play act, dress up as different people,
pretend they're different people, mimic others, act as if they animals
to amuse their kids, dress up in costumes for Halloween and
masquerade balls, join Civil War recreation clubs, have imaginary in
their head conversations, practice speeches before imaginary
crowds.
In our sleep we have strange and surreal dreams of impossible

61
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

situations and lands and scenarios. Dreams can resonate and haunt
us deeply. Dreams affect how he think and act in our daily lives.

****

The surreal situations, fictitious plots, made up characters and

distorted figures of art go hand in hand with our normal dreaming,
speculation, play acting lives. A novel may have a made up plot and
fictions characters, but our daily speculation and day dreams involve
similar fiction. Science fiction is often a serious intellectual, if also
entertaining, speculation of the future and space. A painting or
movie may have a surreal landscape and bizarre characters, but so
do our dreams. Much art is about dreams and daydreams.

The Dream by Marc Chagall

62
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Beyond practical function, why do humans day

dream, speculate and play act? Do you think there
are important purposes for this? If so, does art serve
a similar function?

63
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

( 12 )
Cognitive psychology: introduction
We interpret art using many of the cognitive methods and
techniques we use in the real world. Humans have learned and
inborn mental methods, biases and assumptions used to
nonconsciously identify things and judge the complex information
in our daily lives. We compare side-by-side objects to judge size,
distance and speed. We identify distant silhouetted objects by how
their shapes match up with our memories. We 'recognize' objects
and qualities in paintings, sketches and movies using these same
nonconscious methods. The following chapters show psychological
methods we use to process information in the physical, mental and
art worlds.
Realize that humans never see the entirety of an object or
scene, any object or scene. Not only are things such as coffee cups
and sticks and tree branches partially visibly obscured by
overlapping other objects, but we can never see all sides and parts of
an object at once. Even with an apple you've turned over in your
hands, you can't be sure whether it’s fresh or rotten in the core until
you bite or cut it apart. Humans live, learn and learn how to process
and judge information in an environment where information is
always obscured or otherwise hidden from view.
Ambiguity is a concept essential to understanding humans, as
humans constantly make choices in the face of ambiguous
information. Often caused by missing or obscured information,
ambiguity means there is more than one possible explanation to
something, and the viewer doesn’t know, often can’t know, which
one is correct. In the face of ambiguity, the mind will almost always
pick the explanation that meets its expectations and experience.

64
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

( 13 )
Cognitive psychology: shape,
patterns and form biases

Human visual perception is profoundly influenced by biases about

forms, shapes and patterns. Humans have ingrained and
nonconscious attractions for specific forms, shapes and patterns.
Some of these biases are genetic, while others are learned. These
biases greatly influence how we perceive, organize and label, and
are essential to the quick identifications needed to go through life.
You instantly perceived a dog in the black shape that started this
chapter, even though the shape lacked fur, eyes, whiskers, correct
size and other essential doggy details. You didn't have to
contemplate the shape. You perceived it instantly.
The problem for humans is that their biases for certain shapes,
forms and patterns are so strong and ingrained that they will
perceive these things when don’t objectively exist. These biases lead
to many visual illusions.
Our form and pattern biases are shown when we perceive horses
or castles or hot rods or other familiar shapes in clouds. These
‘identifications’ are subjective to the viewer, and do not objectively
exist in cloud. There are thousands of possible connect-the-dot
shapes in a cloud, but you perceive, or mentally pick out, that which
matches your knowledge. The horse or castle is a projection of what
exists in your mind. If there were no horses on earth or in fantasy
books, you would not perceive a horse in the cloud, as you wouldn’t

65
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

‘recognize’ it.

We perceive a person in the lines and squiggles of the

Rembrandt etching just many do an animal in the cloud.

The connect-the-dot figures in stars don't exist except as we

draw them. The familiar faces or figures we perceive in burnt toast,
wood grain and stones are projections of our minds. What you
perceive is as much a reflection of you as what you are looking at.
I hope it dawns on you when you pick up a stone that ‘looks
just like Elvis,’ the stone existed long before Elvis was born. It
would be silly to believe the stone was formed by glaciers 10,000
years ago to commemorate Elvis’ future rise to popularity on the pop
charts.

****

66
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The Face on Mars

In 1976 the NASA spacecraft Viking 1 took photographs of an area

on the planet Mars that contained many giant mesas, craters and
other geological formations. One of the mesas in the photographs
somewhat resembled a human face. As should not be unexpected,
many humans on earth became interested in this ‘human face’ (and,
not surprising, were less interested in the formations that didn’t
resemble human body parts). Some were and still are convinced the
mesa was constructed by intelligent life form. This perception of a
face is a pattern bias, a projection of the viewer’s mind whose own
face has a similar form. If someone has patterns in his mind (human
face, kitty cat, square, letter ‘B,’ house key, baseball cap, house) and
looks at enough information (such as all the geological formations
on a planet’s surface), he will be able to pick out some of these
patterns in the information. Seeing the ‘face of Nixon’ isn’t proof a
potato was built by intelligent life form. It means that out of millions
and millions and millions of potatoes, a few are bound to somewhat
resemble a former US President who had a sticky outy nose.
As the following images show, the face on Mars is just one of
many mesas, hills and craters that come in a wide variety of shapes.

67
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Just another mesa in the crowd

68
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Years later, the above photograph of the same mesa was shot at
a different angle and time of day. This shows that angle and shadow
contributed to the perception of a face. If originally shot at this angle
and time of day, the mesa may not have been perceived as a face and
humans on earth would have considered it no more significant than
any of the other blobs in the photographs.

Smiley face of Mars?

****

69
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Is it a Vase or Two Faces?

The standard Is it a vase or is it two faces looking at each other?

visual illusion shows that humans project a subjective, or personal,
identity onto an object. You initially see a black vase or a pair of
white faces looking at each other. As you stare longer your
perception will be replaced by the other view, then your perception
will flip back and forth between the two views. The image is
unchanging, while your perception of it changes. Of course it is
neither a vase nor faces, but a black and white abstract pattern. The
pattern could be perceived as many things. However, in part by your
biases and by the leading question (‘Is it a vase or faces?’), you
perceived a vase and faces. As I look at the image, I could see how
the top or bottom portion could be perceived as two boots placed
back to back. The chin to nose areas could be perceived as little
black faces. The black shape could be seen as a table. In fact there’s
no reason, beyond viewer’s predilection for order, that the pattern
has to depict anything specific.

70
Art Perception * David Cycleback

71
Art Perception * David Cycleback

72
Art Perception * David Cycleback

73
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

If a human perceives a rabbit in the above Albrecht

Durer picture and a dog does not, which animal is
demonstrating better visual perception? Humans
sometimes use as evidence of a dog’s dimwittedness
that the dog ‘doesn’t see’ the animal in a magazine or
book, when, of course, there isn’t a real animal on the
page. It’s ink on paper. From its sense of smell alone,
the dog would know there ain’t no rabbit in the above
picture. The dog is faulted for not seeing what isn’t
there.

74
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

“The object of art is to give life a shape.”

– Jean Anouilh

75
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(14)
Cognitive psychology: comparison

Circles A and B are the same size. It the surrounding

grey circles that make circle B appear smaller.

Human perception of objects is influenced by nearby objects,

qualities and other information. Both consciously and
nonconsciously we judge things through comparison. To measure
fabric one compares the cloth to a yard stick. To judge the size of
someone’s hand, you might press your palm against hers. To judge
someone’s speed, you might race him or watch him race someone
else.
In often less exacting comparisons, humans judge the length,
height, angle, shape, color and distance by comparing one object to
others in the scene. Looking at a family snapshot photo you might
guess the height of a stranger by comparing him to someone you
know. You will guesstimate the distance to a house by comparing its
size to the sizes of closer houses and trees. You will guesstimate an
angle by comparing it to a level line (“Appears to be about 10-15%
off from level”).
Often these guesstimates are accurate within a reasonable
degree. You might guess that stranger in the photo is 6 feet tall, as
you know your aunt is 5’ 5.” When you meet him, you may discover
he’s 5’10-1/2.” Not perfect, but a darn good guess—especially as
you were unable to clearly see what shoes they had been wearing.

76
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

A problem is that, while comparing to other objects is essential

to making judgments, comparisons can lead to errors. Seemingly
logical comparisons can produce answers that are bizarrely wrong.
These errors happen when assumptions about an object or about the
overall scene are wrong.
What happens if you incorrectly remembered your aunt as 6
feet tall, instead of 5’5,” as the last time you saw her you were a five
year old munchkin? Your calculations of the man’s height will be
similarly off. You might wrongly guess he was 6’7.” What happens
if she was wearing flats in the photo, while he, shy about his height,
was wearing lifts? What happens if the man couldn’t make the
family reunion and a cousin photo-shopped in an image of him?
The following pictures show how your perception is distorted
by surrounding information.

The above two horizontal lines are straight and parallel. The angled background
makes them appear to bend. Without the angled background, the lines would
appear parallel.

77
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

All the horizontal and vertical lines are straight and equally spaced. In other
words, all the large checkerboard squares are perfect squares of the same size. It
is the placement of the tiny squares that creates the appearance of the ‘bulge.’

The men are the same size. Measure them yourself. It is the skewed diminishing
scale lines that make them appear to be of different sizes.

78
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The figures in the Rembrandt are inches high, yet we

perceive them as normal size people. This shows that
paintings are visual illusions.

Godzilla is a small man in a rubber suit. The surrounding even smaller set
and props makes him appear big. If the set and props were many times
larger, we'd perceive Godzilla as small as a mouse. It's all visual illusion.

79
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(15)
Cognitive psychology: imagination

What's going on in this Jan Vermeer painting? We can only imagine.

When looking at a scene, all humans have the natural and

nonconscious ability to extrapolate beyond what is visible. When
information is missing, or assumed to be missing, humans make it
up in their minds.
This ability is essential to normal living, as we must regularly
make quick guesses with limited information. When you step on a
sturdy looking building step, you assume it will hold your weight.
When you pull a book from the library shelf, you assume the pages
are filled with words. When your waitress brings you a steaming
mug, you assume it is filled with a hot liquid.
In many cases the extrapolation is accurate, or at least a fair
estimate of reality. If your dog is standing on the other side of the
open doorway, half hidden by the wall, you correctly assume an
entire dog exists. As the dog steps forward into the room, your

80
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

assumption is proven correct. When the waitress puts down your

steaming coffee mug, you are far from surprised to see it's filled
with the hot coffee you ordered. Humans would be a dim, slow
species if we couldn't make these kinds of elemental deductions.
In many cases, however, the extrapolations are wrong. These
bogus extrapolations involving the viewer non-consciously
perceiving what he wants to see or expects to see.
The following pages show examples of correct and incorrect
perceptions based on imagining what is not seen.

Though the dogs block our view we assume there is snow behind them like
the snow we see surrounding them. This assumption is likely correct.

81
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Though the overlapping prevents us from ever knowing, most will assume the
above shows whole playing cards. I assume the cards are rectangular and whole.

The below says I Love You several times:

Now read the same text with the ruler removed:

82
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

In the above, most perceive a cube behind the three diagonal

bands. With the bands removed, we perceive something different.

83
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Even though the figure in the left painting literally has no legs, we
perceive Mona Lisa as a whole person and not as some freakish
amputee. This mimics how we automatically perceive as whole a
real person standing behind a fence or sitting behind a desk. We fill
in unseen information in our minds. All art has missing or
perceived to be missing information that we image to exist.

84
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and

what's out.”
– Martin Scorsese

85
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(16)
The ambiguity and
imagination of language
Our daily language is ambiguous and can be interpreted in different
ways. Words have multiple meanings, definitions change and
multiply over time, phrases are interpreted differently by different
people and differently by the same person in different situations.
Voice intonation, pacing, grammar and facial expressions
communicate meaning. The audience uses its experience, education
and culture to guess what is meant.

John and I went to the food court. We ate at Taste of India.

The above everyday sentences seem straight foreword but can be

interpreted in many ways. The 'we' of the second sentence
commonly is read to mean John and 'I,' but this reading is a guess.
It could mean the narrator and someone else than John, or perhaps
the narrator, John and someone else or multiple people. It's very
plausible the two caught up with someone else on the way to the
Taste of India.
Most read the second sentence to mean that Taste of India is at
the food court and they ate there soon after they arrived at the food
court. However, this is also assumption. There’s nothing in the
sentence that says the Taste of India is not far away from the food
court and their eating didn’t take place days if not months later.
It is even an assumption that the two sentences relate to each
other. They could just happen to be sitting next to each other, like
strangers on a bench. For all you know, I lifted them from different
books, published 15 years apart.

Even when in Kyoto how I long for Kyoto when the cuckoo sings

In the above you can't go home again line by famous 1600s

86
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, the word Kyoto has different

meanings. The first Kyoto indicates the physical city and the
second refers to a past life in the city, perhaps a childhood. Or at
least that’s how readers commonly interpret it. Basho died over 300
years ago and no one today knows what he meant.

****

Comedy regularly plays on the ambiguity of language:

Lt. Frank Drebin: Miss, I'm Lt. Frank Drebin, and this is Captain
Ed Hocken, Police Squad.
Buxom Female Shop Assistant: Is this some kind of bust?
Lt. Frank Drebin: Well... it's very impressive, yes, but we need
to ask you a few questions.
-- Naked Gun 2-1/2 (1991, Paramount Pictures)

****

The impossibleness in translating poetry

Beyond the changed words, the foreign language translation of a
poem alters and often destroys the original poem. With rare
exception the translation of a beautiful poem can be similarly
beautiful or literally faithful, but not both.
Poetry is uniquely tied to the native language-- the unique word
definition, culture, diction, rhyme, sound, meter, feel and even
physical length of words and phrases. Due to the literal and
figurative differences between languages, a foreign language
translation of a poem not only changes the literal words but the
poem. It is not possible to change the language and perfectly
preserve the original meaning.
This is elementally illustrated by the translation of simple
rhyming poems. While 'dog' and 'fog' rhyme, the standard Spanish
translations of 'perro' and 'neblina' do not. To make the translation
rhyme, the translator must take liberties with the literal meaning. To
keep intact the literal meaning, he must omit the rhyming.
In order to preserve artistic meaning, many translators
consciously dismiss literal translation. The translation is often as
much the artistic creation of the translator as it is of the original

87
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

poet.
The reader of a translation is not reading the original poem. The
translation may be closely related and beautiful and profound, but
it's something different. This illustrates the problem with those who
take literally modern translations of ancient texts.

****

Categories and definitions in language

Language is a common way to organize, label and perceive objects
and ideas. Native language is something we learned as infants, talk,
think and even dream in. Our native language has profound influence
on how we look at the world. Different languages give different
emphasis, meaning, aesthetics, sounds and, perhaps most important,
categories to things. As one perceives and thinks in part through
categorizing (cats belong as one group, dogs belong as one group,
magazines as another), native linguistic categories influence even
nonconscious perception. It influences how we imagine things when
our eyes are closed.
An elemental example of difference between languages is when
a person in Atlanta Georgia and a person in Rome Italy read the
same word ‘pizza,’ yet imagine different things. A pizza in Georgia
is different than a pizza in Italy. If you asked the two to identify a
pizza at a market, they might point to different objects. The Italian
may say of the Georgian’s choice, “You’re crazy. That’s not pizza.
Let me read the label ... Tombstone ... Do not defrost before cooking
... remove cellophane ... Glenview Illinois ... You Americans might
know Slim Whitman and Gilligan’s Island, but you know nothing
about pizza. Come to Rome and I’ll show you pizza.”
Many differences are more subtle. For example, different
cultures do not always categorize color alike. Different languages
can and do have a different number of names for colors. This means
a particular name, say red or green, will apply to a different range of
wavelength on the visible light spectrum. It’s the same total light
spectrum of color for both cultures, but the different numbers of
names divide the spectrum into a different size pieces. Like cutting
two identical pizzas, one into nine pieces and the other into seven.
The pizzas are identical except one has fewer and bigger pieces.
In one culture, ‘red’ can cover a different range of color than the
equivalent word ‘red’ in another culture. What you call red, a person

88
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

on another continent may or may not call red.

Even within a culture, people often categorize colors
differently. This is commonly done in the marginal areas, such as
aqua blue, dark orange versus red, magenta versus pink. It is
probable that you perceive some borderline colors differently than
your spouse, friend or co-workers. If two friends define colors
differently, they may believe they are talking about different cloth
swatches when they are talking about the same one. Or they may
believe they are talking about the same swatch when they are talking
about different.
This between friends difference can be because they don’t have
the exact same color vision and that they never had a serious
discussion about what are the boundaries of aqua blue, or what
constitutes badious, brunneous and gamboges. I don’t recall ever
having an instructor teach the exact boundaries of aqua blue, aqua
marine or magenta, not even in art class. I doubt I ever had an
instructor who knew the exact boundaries.

****

As humans commonly communicate, learn and conceptualize the

abstract through words, different interpretations of words often lead
to conflicts. What may at first appear to be a visual illusion or even
mental illness in a person may be a difference in culture.
An American joke is “Never ask for Squirt on an English
airline.“ To Americans, Squirt is a brand of lemon/lime soda pop. To
the English the word means urine.
I think it’s safe to order 7Up.

****

So, if a tree falls when no one’s around does it make a sound or

doesn’t it?
Many arguments are not caused by disagreement over the main
ideas, but that the arguers unknowingly define terms differently.
Arguers may have different definitions of war, peace, work week,
formal attire, animal, automobile, tall, stiff drink and sexy, even
though they both assume they are using identical definitions. Once
the parties mutually set the definitions (which they didn't do in the
beginning), they are often surprised to discover how much they

89
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

agree with each other. Many arguments, many conundrums, many

philosophical debates exist simply because parties never thought to
mutually define terms.
An age old question is "If a tree falls in the woods and no one
is around to hear, does it make a sound?"
The answer to this question depends on what is the definition
of sound, and a key to the discussion is the determination of what
sound means.
Is sound defined by the act of a human or other animal
hearing? Or can a sound exist with none around to hear it? It would
seem the smart thing to start by looking up the word sound in a
dictionary.
I looked in one dictionary and two encyclopedias. One
encyclopedia said that sound is defined by the ear detecting
(hearing) the vibrations in the air. This would mean the tree in the
question would make no sound if no one is around. The other
encyclopedia and the dictionary defined sound as the vibrations
itself, whether or not someone is around to hear them. By this
definition, the tree would make a sound even if no one was around.
As you see, the famous tree debate isn't a matter of philosophy
but of word definition. The difference between "Yes, it makes a
sound" and "No, it doesn’t make a sound" can come down to the
arbitrary choice of definition, the outvoting of 2 reference books to
1, the flipping of a coin. Depending on what definitions used, the
answer of Yes and No can describe the same forest scene. Is one
sound definition superior to the other? Not that I can see. They’re
just different.
People also have differing definitions of the word one in ‘...no
one is around to hear...’ Some people think deer, birds and mice
count as ones, while others think only humans count. The definition
of one can also determine whether the answer is Yes or No.

****

Certain words have strong connotations in a culture, and people

intentionally play around with the definitions so they can apply
words as they desire. If patriot is a popular label, people will fiddle
with the definition so that they are defined as patriots and their
enemies are not. If patriot is an unpopular label, the same people
would define the word so that their enemies are patriots and they are

90
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

not. These shameless self serving manipulations of definitions are

common during political campaign season, but also during our daily
lives. What may be a lie when someone else does it is a fib if you do
it.
Notice these instances involve people being emotionally
attached to a word no matter how it is defined. It’s word
numerology.
When I was in high school, the quarterback for the football
team came to school wearing a pink sweater. He spent the day
saying, “No, it’s coral.”

91
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Did you know?

In Japanese, a haiku poem is written as a single
vertical line. Our three line version is a translation
into our Western horizontal writing structure.

92
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(17)
Presenting works of art ‘authentically’
Similar to the problem with translating poetry is the problem in
trying to present old works of arts in modern times.
Many wish to present a Shakespeare play or Verdi Opera the
way it was originally presented, and there are complaints about
colorizing old black and white movies.
Advocates of original presentation often refer to a work of art
presented in the original manner as being "authentic."
There are a variety of problems in the presentation of old
works. For example, the original work or presentation can be
unrealistic to its subject. Shakespeare's plays were written for and
originally performed by male actors only. Juliet and Ophelia were
performed by boys dressed as women. Even those who like the idea
of original presentation prefer the inclusion of actresses, meaning
they want a Shakespeare performance modernized.
A similar case is where a grandfather clock chimes in
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, yet the grandfather clock had not yet
been invented in Caesar's time. Some would argue that fixing this
historical error would make the play more historically authentic.
Others would counter that, while the grandfather clock clearly is a
historical blooper, the play was intended as a work of art not a
historical document, and 'fixing' every detail could lessen the play
artistically. They might point out that a Paul Cezanne painting of an
apple is supposed to represent an apple not look like an apple
photographed, and those who criticize the painting for not being
photorealistic miss the point.
Technical modernization can improve the audience’s perception
of an old work. Improved technology makes Gone With The Wind
look and sound clearer in the theatre today than in 1939. It would be
a safe bet that Paul McCartney prefers listening to The Beatles on a
modern player rather than on a 1965 record player. Listening to the
1965 record player is more authentic to a fan listening to the music

93
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

on 1965 record player, but listening on modern technology is more

authentic to the music itself.
I'll bet you that some old time Beatles fan has an unplugged
vintage record player sitting on top of a digital music player. This
way he gets the old time look and the modern sound.
Presenting an old work must take into context the audience, its
culture and sensibilities. A play, movie, novel or painting is
continually presented to a modern audience. The language of
Shakespeare was the language of the original audience. It is not the
natural language of today's audience. Today’s audience experiences
the play differently. The use of boy actors in female parts won't be
viewed in the same way as an original audience viewed it. Boys
playing girls and women would at the least distract most to all in a
modern audience.
Even when presented 'authentically' (as originally presented),
the modern audience won't perceive an old work of art authentically,
as they won't experience it as the original (‘authentic’) audience did.
Ironically, making modernizations can make the modern audience's
experience closer to the original audience's experience. Making a
work newer on one level can make it older on another.
Some recreations are less concerned with the art than the
history. Even if the sound is considered unorthodox to modern ears,
performing a Mozart symphony using period instruments, hall, dress
and manners can be of enlightenment and enjoyment to a modern
audience, especially if the audience itself participates in the
recreation by dressing and acting historically.

94
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(18)
Cognitive psychology:
focusing and ignoring

Detour (1950)

Both in real life and when art viewing, humans focus on some
information in a scene while being oblivious to other. The audience
can get into a movie to a point they forget they are sitting in a
theater and watching a projected image showing paid actors seen in
earlier movies. This explains why a movie shark can make jump the
audience in a desert theater one thousand miles from the nearest
ocean. Someone get into a book or music he forgets where he is.
A human does not and cannot simultaneously focus on all
information in a scene. Humans don’t have the mental capacity.
Humans focus on some things and ignore others. When you enter a
room, your eyes are drawn to something or things. Perhaps you
focus on the gracious hosts, perhaps a statue to the side. If there is a
rat in the middle of the floor, your immediate perception will be of
the rat and not of the rose wallpaper.
If you enter the room and there is an attractive nude, you likely
won’t notice what is on the coffee table. You might not even notice
the coffee table. After blushingly excusing yourself and scooting out
of the room, you may not recall the existence of a coffee table, but it
was there right in front of your eyes.

95
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

This focus, and the resulting perception, is your creation.

****

Is it three bars or a horse shoe?

With the just shown impossible trident visual illusion, the viewer
forms a perception about the whole from looking at just one end.
When she looks at the other end, she realizes her extrapolation
was wrong. Unlike many of the other visual illusions in this book,
there is no missing information. All of the information is there for
the eyes to see, but the viewer forms her initial perception as if
information is hidden. She mentally hides the information herself.

****

The viewer’s purpose shapes perception. A person going to look at

the art will have a different perception of the museum than someone
merely stopping by to use bathroom. A kid visiting to do a report on
sculpture will have a different perception of the art than a kid doing
a report on paintings. If they visit different areas of the museum and
enter different doors, they may have different ideas about the
building’s architecture.
The purpose is formed before the scene is viewed, meaning a
perception is partially predetermined.

96
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

“Cinema should make you forget you are in the

theater”
– Roman Polanski

97
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Picasso said sometimes he wasn't trying to make

something that was beautiful-- he had different
purposes, such as representing three dimensions--
and considered the usual clichéd commentary
about the artwork's beauty or lack thereof beside
the point.

98
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(19)
Basic qualities that evoke
aesthetic reactions

Which design pleases your senses more? Which is calm and serene and
which is loud and noisy? Your picks are natural.

Using brain scans, neuroscientists such as Semi Zeki of University

College London and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran of University of
California at San Diego have shown that much of our aesthetic
perception of art is natural emotional reaction to basic sensory
stimuli. Whether viewed on their own or incorporated into art or the
physical world, many simple, basic qualities and designs evoke
natural psychological, aesthetic and even physical reactions in
humans. Many of the basic ideas in this chapter come from the work
of Zeki and Ramachandran.
The reactions we have to certain colors, angles and textures are in
part hard wired into our brains, though can be honed and altered
with experience, education and culture. Artists use these emotion
inducing qualities to help express their artistic ideas and create
aesthetic feelings. A landscape painter may use warm colors and
soft lines to evoke pleasant and serene reactions, while an
advertising poster artist or propagandist may use bold colors and
jagged lines to excite the senses and raise the blood pressure.
The following looks at just several of these qualities and our
responses. When you think about them, you will realize that many of
these reactions have practical uses, uses that helped us survive as a
species and live efficient lives today.

99
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Symmetry and Balance

Humans are naturally attracted to symmetrical and balanced scenes

in nature and designs in art. We judge the health and beauty of other
humans by symmetry. The standard beautiful face and healthy
young body is symmetrical. On the flip side, someone with a
hunchback, limp or disfigured limb is seen as injured or diseased. A
flower that is wilted or a tree that is shifted to one side is seen as
dying or sick.
Artists commonly use symmetry and balance to depict beauty
and elicit a pleasurable, serene response in viewers. An artist who
wants to express disorder, violence and chaos may remove
symmetry and balance. He may leave things out of place, make
things crooked and messy. Movie monsters are commonly depicted
as deformed and unbalanced. Zombies drag limbs. The earlier
pictured Nosferatu has a hunchback. Humans get a negative visceral
reaction from this.
This hard wired attraction to symmetry and visceral distaste of
out of balance was important to our survival as a species, as mating
with youthful healthy people and raising healthy crops helped
ensure the survival of the species.

100
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Out of place. Both in art and in the physical world, and even on the
dining room table, humans automatically notice things that are out
of place. This not only catches our attention in art, but is necessary
for our survival as a species. Our ancient in the wild selves wouldn't
have survived long if they didn't notice things abnormal or
seemingly out of place.
If you ask kids, they can make up a story about what is going
along with the above dots. They may say the two dots are rebels
shunned by the groups, or they may say they are trying to catch up
with the group. To many, these dots are telling a story, even if they
are not sure what it is the story.

Mysteries and solving mysteries

Humans are distressed and intrigued by ambiguous scenes,
juxtaposition of seeming unrelated things, mysteries and puzzles in
art and in the physical world. Our blood pressures raise and our
attention is drawn. This initial psychological response towards
mysteries, as is often used in art, is natural. As is the following
trying to figure out what is the meaning in the mysteries and what is
the relationship between and larger meaning in the juxtaposed
objects. Emotionally responding to then feeling psychologically and
intellectually compelled to solve mysteries is natural to humans, as
is the pleasurable response we get when we feel we've solved the
mystery. There's a reason why so many people get enjoyment out of
television mysteries, jigsaw and crossword puzzles and magic eye
pictures-- at least when, in the end, the mystery is solved, or the
puzzle finished. If the puzzle is never finished, or the who done it in

101
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

the Murder She Wrote is not given or is otherwise unsatisfactory

('That was so contrived with so many illogical plot turns and
missing details that no one in the audience could have figured it out.
In a proper mystery, the audience has to at least have a chance to
logically figure it out.'), then the emotional response naturally is not
pleasurable.
This mystery and mystery solving applies to still art, including
paintings and photographs. People naturally ponder what is going
on, try to solve the puzzle, figure out what the people in the scene
are doing and thinking, who they are.
This all mirrors our ancient days when humans in the wild were
at first distressed or intrigued by a mystery then glad when it was
solved. Solving or at least reacting to such mysteries was essential
to survival.
In fact, humans enjoy solving a mystery more than knowing the
answer right away. The final pleasure is heightened when it is
preceded by mystery and mental problem solving effort.

Meaning and Identification

People naturally like scenes, situations and art where they know
what is the meaning and identity, as opposed to where the meaning
(if there is one) is a complete mystery. People often have viscerally
negative reactions to abstract art, because they don't understand it.
They don't know what it is supposed to mean, they don't see
identifiable objects. They want it to be like 'normal' art where there
is an obvious boat or a house or animal or mountains.
People who are artists or otherwise more educated about art,
tend to like abstract art more, because they understand it more. With
more exposure and longer viewing of an abstract painting, people
tend to like the painting more. It's their initial, gut reaction that is
most negative and visceral.
This is a natural reaction in humans throughout our history, as
all humans have never liked, or at least are highly intrigued, when
faced with a situation where they have no idea what is going on.
They want concrete answers and identities. It's important to survival.

102
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Contrast
Related to mystery and identification, people naturally like good
contrast and have a negative or intrigued reaction to lack of contrast.
This is because good contrast means we can identify things, and bad
contrast makes identification and distinction harder to impossible.
Fog and dark obscure or hide identity and blur the line between
different objects. There is a reason that murder mysteries and horror
movies often involve fog and dark. The hidden and obscured scares
us, literally raises our blood pressures. When the fog or dark is
removed and a harmless scene is revealed, there is a pleasing,
relaxing reaction.

Monet painting of a foggy scene

Unrealistic exaggerations
Professor Ramachandran says that humans are psychologically
influenced by unrealistic exaggerations of certain qualities. Take
size as one example. To humans, the larger the wolf or alligator or
gorilla or bear or mountain, the more intimidating and awesome.
The larger man is assumed to be the more powerful than the smaller
one. Logically, you know you will likely someday see a house and
bear and spider bigger than you've seen before. This mindset
extends beyond the bounds of reality. In the extremes, we get
impossible super powerful and super sized characters such as
Hercules, Superman and the Incredible Hulk. If a gorilla is
intimidating due to its size and strength, then King Kong is that
much more intimidating.
This helps explain our psychological reactions to the

103
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

exaggerated in art, dreams and day dreams.

Identifying objects through basic qualities

Professor Zeki says humans naturally identify objects by basic,
essential qualities. As objects such as trees, apples and dogs each
vary to degree from specimen to specimen (two apples will differ in
tone, shape and/or size), we must be able to identify them by these
basic qualities, such as general color, general shape, general size
and weight. Many artists reduce the subjects of their art into the
bare essentials that allow the viewers to recognize what they are.
The ability to identify objects by general key qualities is essential to
our survival since our ancient days, as bananas, for example, don't
come in the exact same sizes, shapes and tones and we need to
identify what objects are edible.

Most people identify this detail from a Paul Cezanne painting

as fruit.

Impressionism, such as this 1913 painting The Parasol by Karl

Albert Buerhr, tried to show how light played on objects and
how the human eye naturally saw things. We recognize it as a

104
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

person in a wooded and bushes area.

An apple, of course. Notice that many symbols use the

bare essentials of what they symbolize. Blue for sky or
water, black for night, stick figure with stick arms and
legs for human, :) for happy.

Amedeo Modigliani painting that we perceive of as a

woman

105
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The strange and new

Things that are brand new and strange to your eyes, such as an
albino squirrel in your back yard or a bizarre animal at the zoo,
catch your attention and imagination and literally raise your blood
pressure. This response is important as our current and ancient
caveman selves wouldn't have survived long if they didn't notice and
ponder about new and strange things. Artists regularly use bold
radical designs, odd objects, strange juxtapositions to catch the
imagination of viewers and focus attention. Experiencing the new is
often a major part of experiencing the sublime.
Of course, new and strange is relative. A plant rare and exotic in
Oslo may be a common weed in Nebraska.

Colors
Humans have psychological reactions to colors, both due to nature
and culture. Bright red and yellow naturally stimulate the senses and
raise blood pressure, while blue is calming. Brown is earthy in both
the figurative and sometimes literal sense, while green is naturally
and culturally associated with nature.
People have naturally favorite colors. It is often inborn.
Someone may not know why blue is his favorite color, he just
knows that it is. The color is pleasing over other colors. He won't
know why brown or green isn't his favorite, it just isn't.
Women tend to have better green/red color perception than
men, so it should not be of surprise that women more commonly
pick green as their favorite color. Green will appear more vibrant to
the average woman than the average man.

106
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The previous chapter showed some basic things that

evoke natural reactions. Give one or two more
examples. They can include variations on the ones
mentioned in the chapter or brand new examples.

Find and describe two juxtapositions (you can do an

online search) and explain what the juxtapositions
signify or symbolize, if just by your personal
interpretation.

107
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Symmetry in architecture. People associate symmetry with

order and tradition. Some find these qualities aesthetically
pleasing while others find them stuffy and too old fashioned.

Asymmetry and strangeness in architecture. The unusual,

asymmetrical design of Mexico's Museo Soumarya instantly
catches the attention of both those who like and dislike it. The
unusual design is associated with modernity, invention and
cutting edge. It seems like a museum that would hold modern
art.

108
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

To promote the 1993 action thriller movie The Fugitive,

the poster designers tilted the image and words, placed
the actor off center left and give him an unbalance body
position. These things evoke action, movement, danger, a
world out of kilter.

109
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Neuroaesthetics
Neuroaesthetics is the name for the scientific study of
aesthetic perception, and involves neuroscientists,
biologists, psychologists and others. Many scientists
are skeptical of the field--- or at least of getting
concrete answers--, because sublime, beauty and
ugliness are subjective and can't be objectively
identified or measured. Many artists and art lovers
dislike the scientific study of art perception because
they feel the knowledge ruins the mystery important
to art.

110
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(20)
Night versus day vision

Albert Ryder's The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse)

Due to our optics, humans see better in daylight than dark. This is
reflected in our perception and description of the world and in our
art and language.
There almost always is light when it is pitch black to humans,
but it is in wavelengths human eyes can’t detect. Ultraviolet and
infrared light are commonly present, but invisible to humans. A
human can get a suntan from ultraviolet light and feel the warmth
associated with infrared light, yet is unable to see either.
There are legitimate reasons for humans to naturally fear, or at
least be wary, of the dark. We don't know what's out there. If we
run in it, there's a good chance we could trip and fall. That's not

111
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

superstitious, that's common sense.

Other animals have night and day vision different from humans.
Owls see better in night than in day. It's not that objects like picnic
tables and fence posts physically vanish in the dark of night. It's that
humans are unable to see them. Owls see them fine. Geese see
ultraviolet light invisible to humans. Geese eyes see all the color we
see, plus the color of ultraviolet.
Darkness is popularly associated with sinister, and light with
goodness. Look at the common dark words and phrases:
Dark angel
Dark and mysterious
He has a black heart
The darkness of his soul
Dark motives
He has a dark mind
Heart of Darkness
The color black is worn as a statement by brooding teenagers.
In Western culture, white, yellow and other bright colors are
associated with happiness and goodness. Someone who is upbeat
and smiley is said to be in a bright or sunny mood.
Hell is commonly pictured as shadowy and Heaven as sunny.
Good angels are typically described as wearing white. Virginal
brides wear white. The Wicked Witch of the West wore black. The
Good Witch of the East wore white.
Monsters are commonly called creatures of the night, and
genuine creatures of the night, such as bats and owls, have been
called monsters and demons.
Vampires, as the stories go, rise at night from their coffins and
die when exposed to daylight. The cursed man becomes a werewolf
at the full moon of the night.

112
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Shadows and darkness of film noir

113
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Explain how art would be different if humans

had the night vision of owls or the sensory
abilities of bats?

114
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

In art, people tend to like meaning that is implied

rather than explicitly spelled out. A movie that
telegraphs or beats you over the head with its point
is critically downgraded, even if the point is
considered valid. Why do you think this is? Why
is it aesthetically important to people that meaning
be implied?

115
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(21)
Instant perception and
uncorrectable illusions

Humans make many visual perceptions in an instant. In an instant

can mean the instant eyes are laid upon a scene. It also sometimes
means the perception suddenly flashes in the mind after looking at
the scene for a while. An example of the latter is when you stare at a
Magic Eye picture before the hidden image is suddenly revealed.
Another is when you are looking at a crowd of faces and all of a
sudden recognize a friend.
These instant perceptions often come from the nonconscious.
That they arise instantly and from within, like epiphanies, make them
powerful even when wrong. To true believers, they didn't arbitrarily
pick out the Face on Mars, they recognized it as one recognizes a
relative in a crowd.

****

Even after you learn how they work, there are many visual illusions
that still fool you. If you returned and look again at the visual
illusions shown throughout this book, many will still fool your eyes.
The mind contains compartments that perform specific tasks. For
example, one compartment is used for comprehending spoken
language, another for perceiving smell. Some of these compartments
are isolated from other parts of the brain. They work on their own,
not influenced by goings on elsewhere. These compartments
sometimes are even isolated from conscious knowledge.
The perception of many visual illusions is made independent of
your conscious knowledge. This explains why even your conscious
knowledge that they are illusions doesn’t solve your nonconscious
misperception.

116
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(22)
Perception of movement

Perception and misperception of movement is similar to the

perception and misperception of still images. The viewer sees a
limited amount of information from a scene and, using its
experience, knowledge, biases, internal mental abilities and logic,
makes a guess at what is going on. Often, this guess is correct, or at
least a good approximation. Other times it is wrong.
Except for more extreme situations (very slow movement, very
small objects), the human optical system is good at detecting the
presence of movement. The misperceptions most commonly happen
in the interpretation of the movement. Humans can correctly detect
the presence of movement but misinterpret the direction, speed and
even what is moving. A human can think object A is moving, when
it is object B that is moving.
The following are two common examples of correctly detecting
the presence of movement, but misinterpreting it.

117
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The parked car prank

A prank you have probably heard about is where two
pranksters park their cars on each side of an open
parking space. Sometime later the unsuspecting victim
parks his car between these two cars. When the victim is
fiddling with his keys or checking the contents of his
wallet or looking in the glove compartment, the two
pranksters suddenly drive forward in unison. The victim
gets the instant sensation that his car is moving
backwards and panics. He soon figures out what is
going on, but is embarrassed. This is an example where
a person correctly identifies movement, but
misinterprets what is moving. Also note that his
misperception was influenced by instinct, the victim
having little control over the adrenaline rush.

Baseball’s changeup
In baseball, pitchers use the so called changeup pitch to
fool the batter. A changeup is intended to look like a
fastball, but is slower. The changeup is typically thrown
after a fastball, often after consecutive fastballs. Then,
seeing the normal fastball arm and body motion of the
pitcher, the batter believes the ball is again coming fast
and swings accordingly. When the changeup works, the
unexpected speed results in the hitter making feeble or
no contact with the ball.
As pitching great Warren Spahn said, "Hitting is
timing. Pitching is upsetting timing."

Stroboscopic Movement Illusions and Movies

When watching an old Western movie there is a curious effect that
sometimes stands out. The wheels of a moving wagon sometimes
appear to be still, rotating slower than they should or even rotating
backwards. This happens when the rotation speed of the spokes was
not in synchronicity with the speed of the film.

118
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The three still images of a wagon wheel look to show the wheel
in the same position, but they show the wheel at different rotations.
The middle picture was rotated 90 degrees from the left image, and
the right image is rotated an additional 90 degrees.
That each spoke is shaped and colored identical to the others is
an essential contribution to the illusion. If these were the stills in a
movie the rotating wheel would appear to be motionless. If they
were the stills in a movie, but the rotation was 80 degrees instead of
90, the wheels would appear to be going backwards.
The wagon wheel illusion in a movie is an example of the
stroboscopic effect. In the dark, a strobe gives off intermittent
flashes of light. Under a strobe, the viewer views a moving object
though short intermittent snapshots instead of a continuous view.
This can lead to misperception of the object’s movement, as the
viewer nonconsciously imagines what is going on in between the
flashes.
Say you are watching a swinging pendulum under stroboscopic
lighting. If the strobe flashes a quick burst of light once every
second and it takes the pendulum exactly one second to swing back
and forth, the pendulum will appear to you to be motionless. Each
flash catches the pendulum in the same position, the pendulum
having done quite a bit of moving in the darkness between flashes.
If the flashes catch the pendulum at its extreme right position, the
pendulum will appear to being pulled, pushed or blown right.
The stroboscopic flashes create visual ambiguity. There are
different possible explanations for what the viewer sees. The viewer
typically, and often nonconsciously, chooses the explanation that
meets his expectations. If you and others saw no movement in a
daylight object, it would be considered bizarre for you to proclaim
that the object was swinging back and forth. However, this bizarre
proclamation would be correct with the apparently motionless

119
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

pendulum.

Do these snapshots show a moving or still pendulum? It’s

impossible to tell.

****

All movies as stroboscopic-like illusions

Despite audience perception, movies don’t show continuous, real
movement of a deer running, a car racing or people conversing, but
a series of snapshots of the movement. If you hold up movie film,
you will see it is a series of still images lined up side by side, not
unlike the panels in a newspaper comic strip. When the film is shot
and shown at the proper speed, the viewer’s mind incorrectly
interprets the succession of still images as real movement. To the
mind, ‘realistic movement’ seems the most plausible explanation for
what it is seeing. This choice is made instantly and nonconsciously
and the viewer simply thinks she’s watching real, continuous
movement.
When the film is too slow, the mind is no longer fooled. The
running horse looks choppy and unreal.

****

Ambiguity
As mentioned earlier, ambiguity is a concept essential to
understanding humans, as humans constantly make choices in the
face of ambiguous information. Ambiguity means there is more than
one possible explanation to something, and the viewer doesn’t know,
often can’t know, which one is correct. In the face of ambiguity, the
mind will almost always pick the explanation that meets its

120
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

expectations and experience. Visual illusions, both moving and still,

involve making the wrong pick.
The human mind is designed for speed. Speedy perceptions are
essential for living and surviving in the real world, including
processing fast movement like a charging lion and rolling bolder. A
downside of the speed is there is a fair margin of error. Speed is
often synonymous with haste.

****

Ambiguous Movement: The Barber Pole Illusion

There are instances where, due to restricted viewpoint, it is
impossible for the viewer to know the direction of movement. A
standard example involves the barber pole.

Hung outside the barber shop, a barber pole has diagonal candy
cane stripes that are rotated horizontally. However, looking from a
particular angle it will appear as if the stripes are moving vertically.
Faced with different plausible choices for what it is seeing (possibly
moving up, but also possibly moving sideways), the mind takes a
pick, one that happens to be wrong.
If you watch a barber pole from different angles, you will
alternately perceive the stripes moving vertically and rotating
horizontally. Your mind can’t make up its mind.

****

121
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

As the following three Op Art pictures illustrate, even still images

can trick the mind into perceiving motion. Their designs match up
with the nonconscious brain’s template for what is movement.

122
Art Perception * David Cycleback

123
Art Perception * David Cycleback

124
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Many things work together in our perception of art

This book looks at many, though far from all, of the particulars that
contribute to our perception of art. Remember that each artwork and
individual perception is different, involving different kinds, numbers
and levels of factors.
As a simple exercise to demonstrate the many factors working
simultaneously, look at few famous artworks and make a list for each
one of the particulars going on. This includes art rules and traditions,
cognitive psychology aspects, and so on. There is no simple formula
for explaining an art perception, so making a short list is a good start
at understanding.
I'll start with the Mona Lisa, pictured before.
It's a painting, a popular form of art. It's rectangular, framed and
hung from a wall, a common style for art. It's in a museum, a
common place for famous art. It uses standard techniques and
symbols to show depth (changes in tone, sizing, overlapping). It has
symmetry and balance to please the mind. Though only part of her is
shown we imagine her as whole. The painting is physically smaller
than life size, but we envision her as a normal human size. We
assume there is nature directly behind her where we cannot see, and
not a black hole or used car lot. The soft colors, demure expression
and overlapped hands make her look relaxed and content. She is
famous for her mysterious smile. People wonder what she is thinking,
what she is looking at.

I expect you to do a better job than I just did. I was late for lunch.

125
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(23)
Narrative and the
perception of still information

What's the fox doing?

What do you suppose was happening here?

126
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Narrative is an integral part of how humans perceive, identify and

judge information, both moving and still, realistic and abstract. A
narrative is the conscious and nonconscious story we see and tell
about our lives, attach to observed situations and still objects.
Narrative includes perception of time, plot, order, causation, mood,
action, point of view, emphasis (what is important, what is not),
character motives, past and future. When we look at a still photo or
painting or a distant couple standing at a street light we perceive a
story in progress. We may not know the story, but we take for
granted that there is one. A cup on a table isn't just there, there is a
history of how it got there, where it will go next. Presumably, a
human walked up to the table and placed the cup there, perhaps
drank from it. “Who left this dirty cup on the table?!,” someone may
soon say. “Dirty dishes go in the dishwasher.”
We know the earlier fox image was an observer's snapshot of a
real living animal in mid movement. A good guess is the fox is/was
chasing prey. Did it catch anything? That’s a question to ponder.

****

If you change the narrative to an image, you change the meaning of

the image, at least the perceived meaning. This is why narrative
issues are so important. A still image of a man with a knife is
generally defined by the narrative-- what he is perceived as going to
do with the knife, what he is perceived as having done with the
knife. If the narrative is he just cleaned a fish and is taking the knife
to the sink, the still image has one meaning. If the narrative is he’s
looking to hide a murder weapon, the same still has a distinctly
different meaning. The accuracy of the narrative is no small issue.
It brings up the question of if a still image can be understood
independent of narrative. The two knife narratives were for the same
image. Can the cup on the table's identity and meaning be
determined as it is? Is how it got there essential to its identity?
Humans often like to think they can judge things in a vacuum,
without the relativism of past and present and other objects, but is it
possible?
Some things are defined by their movement. A cheetah in the
wild is defined and identified by how fast it runs. A sidewinder
snake is identified because it moves sideways. When it’s just lying
there, most of us wouldn’t know what kind of snake it is.

127
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Much of our narrative is speculative. We can guess but don't

know the whole story. The judgment of significance, motives and
movements of the players in a scene is influenced by our biases and
personal experiences. Different viewers see different stories in the
same movie.
Consciously and nonconsciously predicting what will happen is
a necessary part of human function. To catch a ball, you don't need
to know just where the ball is at any given moment in flight, but
correctly anticipate where it will be at later moments.
Narrative is an expression of human's philosophy of time,
cause-and-effect, relationships between things. To most humans,
nothing is static, but a part of a linear flow. Even still things and still
images of things are viewed as part of this flow.
What is particularly interesting is humans apply narratives to
abstract images and other information where it is not clear there is a
real narrative.

Describe what going on above? Even though this is an abstract

combination of dots and lines, most will say this shows two balls
racing towards each other. Viewers can even describe what they see
as happening before and after this image. However, unlike a movie
still or snapshot photo, there is no before or after. As I am the one
who created this design, I can assure that this is the only image, the
one and only existence of these dots and lines. There is no narrative
with this image other than as speculated by the viewer. That it shows
balls on a line is itself imagination.
Whether there is a real narrative to the earlier Vermeer painting

128
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

is debatable. It's not a photographic snapshot of live movement, as

with the fox. The narrative and resulting meaning is nothing more
than speculation.
As you can see, artistic experience is speculative, theoretical.
Art is a symbol and metaphor for something larger and something in
the viewers’ minds. Art isn’t so much interpreted by the viewer as
made up. Movement is imagined in the following Matisse, but it
doesn't literally exist. Even the artist having imagined movement
doesn't make it exist.

A question to consider is is narrative the correct way to judge

information? Is it always the correct way? And if it is correct to
view information via narrative, is the human narrative the correct
narrative? Does all human narrative, even as used by scientists,
involve imagination and the associated biases and psychology? Of
course, many of these questions we can't answer.
The movement illusions in the previous Movement Illusions
chapter were all about false narratives. The stroboscopic illusion
involves the viewer creating a narrative about movement that differs
from reality. The perceiving of the barber pole stripes continually
moving up is a false narrative.

****

The mentally ill often have abnormal narratives. They see and

129
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

experience the same now and past and future that you and I see, but
give the pieces a different causality and relationships, viewpoint,
emphasis and soundtrack.

****

Our standard linear storytelling is just a conceit. An arbitrary way of

looking at things. Time and happenings can be described in
different ways.

****

Aleatory Narrative
“Any path is right, if— as according to Bach-- it leads to the
divine”— music historian Paul Epstein on J.S. Bach’s fugues, to
which Bach never gave a playing order.

Aleatory art is art where the finished result is substantially out of the
artist’s hands. It can involve chance or the musicians’ or audience’s
choice. Many games are aleatory. Monopoly involves the roll of the
dice. Poker involves the shuffling of the cards. Aleatoricism in art
can create fresh, inventive, unexpected results. If the results defies
the conventions of plot, narrative and order, that’s the point.
J.S. Bach’s fugues are aleatory in that he never communicated
which order the short musical pieces should be played. They can be
played or listened to in any order, take your pick, randomly program
the CD player. In the above quote, Epstein is saying an overall
sublime aesthetic result justifies whichever fugue order lead to it.
It’s reminiscent of the Hindi saying, “Any path that leads to God is
correct.”
Novelist William S. Burroughs used the so called cut-up
aleatory technique. Pages of text were physically cut up and
randomly pieced back together, sometimes with text by other
authors, creating new and often profoundly surreal meaning and
narrative. Burroughs believed this type of collage more closely
represented the human experience. Despite the conceit of linearity,
humans don’t think or experience things linearly, one’s thoughts
constantly flipping back and forth between past, current and future.
Random little events and objects trigger memories and provoke
speculation of the future. When you consider buying a can of beans

130
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

in the grocery isle, you think about past meals and the future meal
where these beans might be used. The human ability to identify
flowers, shoe brands and people involves comparing the present to
memory. Human intelligence and reasoning involves mentally
flipping back and forth through time.

****

Broken Glass is the name of an aleatory computer storytelling

technique that intentionally scrambles the tradition linear narrative.
It is a computer web page made up of a plethora of small assorted
images, often resembling a stained glass window. Each image is
linked to a small piece of the story-- a plot, a description, a picture,
characterization, whatever. The story’s order is determined by the
reader blindly clicking on the images.
The facts, scenes, characters, events and days of the week are
always constant in Broken Glass, but the aleatory order in which the
pieces are read affects the complexion, aesthetics, psychology and
meaning. As any great novelist or film director will tell you, how
facts are revealed can be as important as the facts themselves. A
story told straight foreword is markedly different than the same
story told in flashbacks. Knowing what will happen to a character,
what she will do and how she will change, effects how you view her
in the present. Knowing versus not knowing how the romance will
end (or will it end?) effects how the movie goers view the lovers
when the first meet, interact. Jumbled up order in and of itself has
psychological meaning and symbolism.

****

Even with a physically bound paper book, the reader chooses the
order in which the book is read. Whether or not they realize it,
readers are as responsible for the order as the author, though the
author usually gets the blame.
William S. Burroughs said the chapters of his novel Naked
Lunch could be read in any order. That a reader read them 1, 2, 3
had nothing to do with him.

****

131
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Other than the editors and writers, it's very possible that the
dictionary is been not been read in the same order by two people.

132
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

I remember as a kid listening for the first time to a

Haydn piece and being disappointed in the
composer as the piece lifted a melody from a
Mozart piece I'd often heard before. After looking
into it, I learned that the Haydn piece had been
composed first and Mozart lifted from Haydn.

133
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

William S. Burroughs felt that cutting up and

shuffling together of texts revealed hidden
information.

134
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(24)
Values, culture and
aesthetics in visual perception

Give an objective identification of what is in the following three

pictures. Answer one picture at a time, by saying the answer aloud
or to yourself. The images are not digital tricks or manipulations.
They were picked because of their straight forward, familiar
subjects. I am just looking for quick objective identifications.

135
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

One or more of your answers likely was on the order of 'George

Washington crossing the Delaware,' 'a bald eagle' and/or 'a watch.'
These answers are not objective, being formed in part by value
judgments, aesthetic views and other personal biases.
In the lower left picture there is much more than a bald eagle.
There is sky, stump, trees. The ‘eagle’ answer subjectively singles
out one thing. Part of this is due to a personal and cultural value
judgment that a bald eagle is more important than the other objects.
Another reason is because the eagle is pictured large, clear and
centered. If the picture showed a tree close up and in focus and a
small out of focus eagle flying in the distant background, your
answer likely would have differed. Change in arrangement, size and
focus effects the viewer’s labeling, even when the identical objects
are pictured.
You may not have known the dark blurriness near the bottom is
trees, but that does not change their identity. If you called them
bushes, that would not make them bushes. It’s common to ignore the
unknown.
Similarly, if your answer to the lower right picture was ‘a
watch,’ you made an aesthetic and value judgment about what is and
is not important. Placement and focus affected your judgment, along
with your feeling that a potentially expensive watch is the center of
attention.
In the top image there are quite a few people pictured. If you
answered “George Washington crossing the Delaware” you singled
out one as being the identity. This is in part due to a higher value
placed on George Washington, a famous figure in United States
history. This is also due to your knowledge, as Washington is likely
the only person you know by name. Again, it is common to focus on
the known and ignore the unknown.
If you said "This pictures a bunch of people, one whose name is
George Washington" you would have given a broader answer, while
acknowledging the extent of your knowledge.
Also notice that your answer was not 'sky, water and ice,' even
though sky, water and ice takes up more space than the men, boat
and flag. This was due to your bias that the human is the natural
center of attention.
The initial request of this chapter was to give objective
identifications, but your answers were subjective. I didn't ask for
your moral judgment of George Washington versus other men,

136
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

whether a bald eagle is more significant than out of focus

background trees or the relative financial value of a watch.

****

These and other types of subjective judgments are both natural and
essential to humans. Quick interpretations of scenes, including
judging what is and is not important, is essential to getting through
our day to day lives. You wouldn't have lasted long on this earth if
you placed equal visual significance on a twig on the pavement and
a car speeding in your path. If someone unexpectedly tosses you a
ball, you catch the ball by focusing on it. If you focus on the
thrower’s shoes or what’s on TV, it is probable you will drop the
ball.
The problem is that, while essential, this type of subjective
identification helps make it impossible to make objective
identification. One’s identification is always shaped by one’s
knowledge level, past experience, aesthetic view, pattern biases and
value judgments. As shown with the identification of the three
pictures, the human is often not aware of this influence. To many
people, biases are what others have.

137
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

A psychologist shows his new patient a Rorschach ink

blot picture and asks her what she sees. She giggles
and says “It's a naked man and a naked woman
kissing.” He shows her another Rorschach ink blot
picture and asks what she sees. She giggles again and
says “It's a man and a woman making love on a table.”
He shows her another Rorschach picture and she says
“It's a couple having sex in a bed.” The psychologist
says “You seem to have a preoccupation with sex.”
She says, “Me?! You're the one with the dirty pictures.”

An old joke

138
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(25)
What we see is different than what
we look at: The physiology of seeing

Rembrandt self portrait

Despite common belief, humans do not perceive a direct and exact

representation of external reality, but a distorted translation formed
by their eyes and mind. The image we see is different than what we
are looking at. This is not some coffee house theory, but
physiological fact. The human eyes and brain do a decent but
imperfect job at detecting and translating light.
This chapter is a look at the physiology of seeing and offers
examples of optical distortion caused by the eyes and mind.
Sometimes this physiology is the primary cause for a visual illusion
in the physical world and in art. Other times it is a lesser but
contributing cause.

139
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

A quick look at the physiology of seeing

When a human looks at an object, light from the object enters the
eyes. The light goes through the cornea, which is a clear covering,
then through the pupil which is a clear circle in the center of the
colored part of the eye called the iris. The pupil gets larger (dilates)
when there is little light and smaller when there is more light. The
lens focuses the light through the aqueous humor, a clear liquid,
onto the retina. The retina, in the back of the eye, contains millions
of tiny photo sensors that detect the light. There are two main kinds
of photo sensors, called rods and cones. Shaped like rods, rods
detect shades and forms and are needed for night and peripheral
vision. Rods are not good at detecting color. Shaped like cones,
cones are needed for seeing details, seeing in daylight and detecting
colors. Cones do not work well in low light. Rods and cones cover
the entire retina except for a spot where the optic nerve connects to
the brain. The optic nerve carries the information received from the
retina to the brain, where the brain translates it into the single image
we perceive, or 'see.'

140
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

The Blind Spot

All humans have blind spots, which are spots where the eye cannot
see. The blind spot corresponds to the spot on the retina where the
optical nerve connects the retina to the brain. At this spot there are
no light detecting cells and, thus, it cannot detect light. A small
object can disappear from view.
In everyday life the blind spot goes unnoticed. This is in part as
the eye is constantly looking around, getting a wide and varied range
of views. It is also in part as the brain uses the information from
both eyes to create the single mental vision. What one eye misses,
the other often picks up.
As its optical nerve connects differently, the octopus has no
blind spot.

Detecting your blind spot

L R

To detect your blind spot using the above letters L and R, hold the
book about two feet in front of your face, close your right eye and
look at the letter R. Slowly move your head forward, towards the
picture. At one point the L will disappear. The L will also disappear
if you start up close and slowly move back. Notice that the missing
spot is filled in white by your mind, so it appears as if nothing is
missing from your view. This illustrates how your blind spot goes
unnoticed during daily living. Many people live their entire life not
knowing they have a blind spot.

****

141
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

After Images
Afterimages are when, after staring at an object, you look away and
still see an image of the object. An example is when you still see the
nighttime headlights of a car, even though your eyes have closed
and the car has turned away. Another is when after looking away
from a candle flame in the dark you still see light in the shape of the
candle flame.
Afterimages happen after the retina's photosensors (the rods and
cones in your eyes) become oversaturated, or burned out, from
staring at a particular color. This burning out is comparable to lifting
weights in the weight room. After doing enough arm curls you lose
your arm curl strength for a short while and will be able to lift only
lighter weights. Your muscles are fatigued, if only temporarily, from
all that weight lifting.
Similarly, after staring at a large area of a single color, the eye’s
photosensors lose their strength for that color. If right afterwards the
eyes look at a blank piece of paper, the photosensors will be weak
towards the previously stared at color but fresh and strong for
detecting the other colors. This imbalance causes the mind to
perceive the image (the afterimage), but in the color opposite to the
original color. To the mind, the weakness towards one color means
the presence of the opposite primary color is stronger. Quirky
perhaps, but this is the way the brain works.
If you are staring at a green image, the afterimage should be red
(the opposite primary color). After staring at a yellow image, the
afterimage should be blue. The mind sees afterimages in primary
colors, so any non-primary color (orange, pink, etc) will be seen as
the primary opposite.
Though they occur almost constantly, afterimages usually go
unnoticed. Afterimages are best observed when focusing on a single
color or object for a lengthy period of time. In normal about the
house viewing we view a wide range of objects and colors at once
and our eyes are always moving around, the view constantly
shifting. In these cases, the afterimages are minor and get lost in the
visual shuffle. We barely if at all notice them.

****

142
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Binocular Vision
Humans have binocular vision, meaning the single image we see in
our mind is made from two different views-- one from each eye.
Binocular vision gives humans a number of advantages. One is
we have a wider field of view than if we had only one eye. The right
eye can see further to the right and the left eye further to the left.
The single vision in our mind shows more than either single eye can
see.
Another advantage is the two views give us imperfect but good
depth perception. People who are blind in one eye have worse depth
perception than the average human.
The mythical Cyclops might at first appear an unbeatable foe,
but a wily human opponent could take advantage of the monster's
poor depth perception and narrow field of vision.

****

Triangularism and Calculating Depth

Binocular vision produces the perception of depth in a way similar
to how triangularism measures length in applied mathematics. When
looking at a distant point using only one point of view it is hard to
impossible to determine the distance accurately. In applied
mathematics, triangularism can accurately calculate this distance
from point a to point b by creating an imaginary triangle.
Trianglularism has long been used in the real world to measure
distant objects, like islands and boats from land and when surveying
land.

Triangularism: From point a alone, it can be impossible to accurately

calculate the distance to point b. In the real world, point a could be you

143
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

standing on land and point b an anchored boat out at sea. However, by

taking angle measurements from point a, then taking an angle
measurement from nearby point c (perhaps a walking distance away), and
measuring the distance from point a to c, one can create an imaginary
triangle that calculates the distance from point a to point b. It’s just a
matter calculating angles and doing the math.

Two eyes give the mind a similar two point view, and the mind
uses these two views to judge distance. This is mostly done
nonconsciously. You simply reach out and grab that pencil or door
knob, no problem. If you wear an eye patch, you may discover it’s
more difficult to grab things on the first try.

****
The Hole In The Hand Illusion

This simple trick plays with your binocular vision to make it appear
as if you have a hole in your hand.
Roll a normal piece of 8x11" paper into a tube and place it next
to your hand as shown in the above picture. With one eye look
through the tube and with the other eye look ahead at the back of
your hand. With a little bit of shifting you should see what appears
to be a large hole through your hand. Your mind takes the two
distinct views to create one bizarre view.

****

144
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

As I said, you don't see physical reality even in the physical world,
but a translation of it. When you are look at a living room or bowl
of apples or painting or mountain range, the image you see is not a
direct representation of the objects. The image is a translation made
by your eyes and mind. As demonstrated, binocularism (changing
two views into one), afterimages (images created by the eyes/mind),
unnoticed blind spots, inability to see colors in low light and
countless other purely physiological occurrences ensure that our
mental image is always different than the objects viewed.
Everything we perceive involves illusion.
As we see only a limited and distorted vision of the physical
world, it only makes sense that we can connect to the limited and
distorted art, and that artists must make a distorted depiction of
reality for us to believe it.

****

If you believe that there is a God who purposely created animals,

why do you think he gave humans such limited eyesight?

****

A mirror mirrors what is in front of it. If you place an apple two feet
in front of the mirror, an identical looking apple will look as if it's
the same distance behind, or into, the mirror. Curiously, if you use
triangulation to measure the distance to the apple in the mirror, the
apple will measure as being two feet behind the mirror. Both our
eyes and scientific measurement say there is an apple two feet
behind the mirror's surface.

****

While humans depend mostly on sight, other animals depend more

on other senses. The blood hound has worse than human eyesight,
but uses its advanced sense of smell to find lost people that even
trained police detectives cannot find. In these instances, the blood
hound's non-seeing perception is more accurate than all of the
detectives' senses combined. This explains why many police
departments have blood hounds on staff.

145
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

Our perception and description of the universe is greatly influenced

by our senses. Humans categorize and label objects in part by
visible colors. Many animals, flowers, gems and even humans are
defined by their visible colors.
As defined by the American Kennel Club, a cairn terrier can
come in all colors except white. If a cairn terrier is born white, it’s
not a cairn terrier. It’s a West Highland Terrier, a different breed.
If we could see infrared and ultraviolet light our categorizations
and objects, including terriers, would be different.

****

If you said you believe that there is a God who purposely created
animals, why do you think he gave some animals better eyesight
than humans'?

****

Considering, for example, we would have better depth perception

and receive more information if we had more eyes, how would you
design perfect eyesight? Realize that if we had one hundred eyes all
over our body, we would still have limited perspective due to where
we stand, our height, etc. What would be perfect eyesight? What
about perfect perception? Our physical perception would still be
limited if it was just about eyesight. Remember smell, hearing and
other senses. How would you design perfect perception? Are there
senses we don't use or know about? Also realize that such advanced
perceptual systems would require a bigger, different brain to process
and interpret the visual information, and the sensory information
would still be interpreted and transformed by the brain.
Do you think art can make up for missing or limited senses?

146
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(26)
The illusion of depth in
two dimensional art

This 1400s Raphael painting uses many techniques to give

the sense of depth, including diagonal lines, diminishing
scale, placing objects top to bottom.

Creating the perception of depth in paintings, sketches and

photographs is a challenge, one that cannot be completely solved.
This is because depth is three dimensional, while a sketch,
photographic print or painting is two dimensional. Three dimensions
cannot physically exist in two dimensions— they are mutually
exclusive.
If you hold a crystal clear family snapshot of the Grand Canyon
in your hand, at least logically you know that distant cliff and cloud
is not miles behind your hand. You know it is just an image on the
surface of a flat piece of paper.
Over the centuries artists have developed techniques to create
the superficial representation of depth in 2D art. Before these

147
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

techniques, paintings and sketches lacked any sense of depth. Cave

drawings appear primitive as the artists didn't understand the
standard concepts of depicting depth. An early European painting
shows objects in unreal proportions to each other. A mile away
person may be the same size as a person up close. People today
would compare the proportions to ‘kid’s drawings.’
This chapter looks at a number of standard techniques used to
give paintings, sketches and other 2D art the illusion of depth. These
are techniques you can observe in art at the museum and incorporate
into your own art. These are also 'techniques' you can observe in a
real life, such as when looking at your living room or across your
back yard. After all, the art is attempting to duplicate natural scenes
such as these.

****

Overlapping objects

An object appears to be in front of the object(s) it overlaps.

Overlapping is the strongest indicator of relative distance,
overriding all other signs when there is seeming conflict. In the
above Cezanne painting, the large center tree overlaps the distant
bridge, mountain and sky.

****

148
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Diminishing scale
With things that are believed to be of same or similar size (2 cats or
2 basketballs), the visually larger appears to be closer than the
smaller. In the Cezanne painting, the viewer assumes that the tree is
much smaller than the distant hills. Thus the difference in scale (tree
taking up more painting space than the hills) makes it appear as if
the tree is closer. In the earlier Raphael painting, the smaller people
appear to be further away than the larger. This is because the viewer
is under the assumption people are of similar size when standing
side by side.

****

Diagonal lines representing diminishing scale

An exemplification of diminishing scale, diagonal lines moving
towards each other as they move up or down a painting or sketch
give the illusion of depth. A real world example of this is a straight
road that appears to become skinnier as it approaches the distant
horizon. Another example is when you stand at one end of an empty
hallway and watch the lines where the wall and floor meet visually
move towards each other as they move to the farther side of the
room.

This photo shows diagonal lines and diminishing scale

149
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

Colors
Without contradicting signs of depth, humans tend to perceive
bright, warm colors like red, orange and yellow as being close, and
dark, cool colors like blue and dark purple as being further away.
This is particularly true for abstract images where there often is a
lack of other depth or identity clues.
For landscapes, adding blue will make hills and mountains look
more distant. The further away the bluer. This mimics the real
world, where distant mountains have a bluish tone.

****

Bottom to Top Placement of Ground and Top to Bottom

Placement of Ceilings Barring conflicting information, humans
generally perceive what is at the bottom of painting to be in front,
and what is at the top to be in the back. This is particularly true
when looking outside where there is no ‘ceiling.’

Top to bottom: The bottom fans appear to be closer than fans and lights
near the top. This is also an example of diminishing scale, with the bottom
fans being larger than the top fans and lights

Inside a building, the ceiling can have the opposite effect, with
the ceiling area nearest you appearing higher than the ceiling area
further away.

150
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

In this room, the floor appears to move up the further it gets away from
you. The ceiling (which is sort of like an upside down floor) appears to
move down. These are both the product of diminishing scale.

****
Focus
Things that are in focus tend to be perceived as closer than things
that are out of focus. This makes sense, as a road sign is blurry if too
far away.
Similarly, objects that have more intense color, detail and
contrast often appear closer than objects that are blurrier, hazier and

less focused.

In this old photograph depth is shown by diminishing scale, the

narrowing lines of the road and building tops, and that with distance
things become blurrier and hazier.

151
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

Many visual illusions manipulate these techniques. The illusions

often use incongruous, seemingly illogical techniques to toy with
our minds. One quality suggests one thing, while another suggests
the opposite. One quality evokes closeness, while another evokes
great distance in the same object. The discord produces an emotional
reaction in the viewer. The illusion will appear impossible to the
viewer, and can literally raise his blood pressure and heart rate.
The natural signs of depth can also fool us in the real world.
Nature can give seemingly conflicting signs. Houses appear larger
and further away in heavy fog. In a movie, what appears as a full
sized house or ship or dinosaur can be a miniature model. Carefully
crafted sets make the things appear many times larger than they are.
The moon appears larger when visually closer to the horizon. Rooms
can be colored to appear roomier.

****

A problem in trying to create realistic depth in two dimensions is

that the human is designed to detect real depth not a flat
representation. Looking at the real back yard, each eye looks at the
3D objects from a different angle, the head and body movement
creating even more perspectives. The mind combines these different
views into the mind's image.
This cannot be done with a two dimensional object. With a still
life painting, and even a still life photograph, it is not possible for
the eyes to get the different views of the fruit bowl that is needed to
perceive a truly 3D fruit bowl. The photograph, no matter how clear,
shows only one angle.
Notice that many attempts to create a closer to true 3D effect
involve alteration not just to the flat image but of the viewer's
vision. 3D movies and pictures often require special glasses and
viewers.
The hologram is a rare example of a flat image that can
realistically simulate three dimensions, allowing the viewer to see
angles and even sides of the pictured object.

****

152
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Cubist paintings, where different sides of an object are seen

simultaneously, can be looked at as an attempt to represent 3D in a
2D plane. A cubist painting sometimes also represented the passage
of time, with a person being shown at different times.

153
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Trompe l'oeil is a painting technique for making flat images look three
dimensional, our pop out of the painting. Considering this 1874
painting by Pere Borrell del Caso is titled 'Escaping Criticism,' the
symbolism is obvious. The young, bare footed boy leaving the artistic
rules represented by the frame, looking far beyond the frame.

154
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Describe how the following two two-dimensional

artworks depict or represent depth.

155
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

1874 Winslow Homer wood-engraving print

156
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night

157
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(27)
The unique subjective experience
Subjectivity is a constant and integral part of the human experience.
Love, lust, like, dislike, taste, smell, views about beauty and
ugliness and art. How you view this paragraph and this book
involves subjectivity— your taste about the writing style, word
choice, chapter subjects and length, book cover.
By definition, a subjective experience is a product of the
individual’s mind. While real and often profound, the subjective
experience cannot be objectively measured by others. When
someone is listening to music, the music’s note, pitch, speed,
volume and the listener’s ear vibration and heartbeat can be
measured by scientific instruments, but the listener’s aesthetic
experience cannot. This experience is experienced by the listener
alone. Even if asked to, the listener could not fully translate the
experience to others, in part because it is beyond words.
It is doubtful that two people have the same subjective
perceptions. People may have similar, but not identical perceptions.
People regularly like the same song but perceive it differently. It’s
common for best friends to like a movie, but one likes it more than
the other or for different reasons.

****

A large range of things determines a person's subjective perception

and experience. This includes genes, education, culture, where and
when born, personal experiences, upbringing, political beliefs,
travel, family make up and personalities, friends, acquaintances,
natural temperament and personality, mental abilities, physiological
abilities (quality of eyesight, hearing, smell), talents, language,
health, hobbies and work.
Little things influence, such as what toy one had as a six year
old and what tea grandmother drank. While walking in a foreign

158
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

land, the scent of jasmine tea can bring back a rush of memories.
The appearance of the toy in a movie will alter one’s emotional
reaction and interpretation of the move. It may have been chance
that the movie viewer’s parents bought that toy, making his movie
interpretation a result of chance. It’s not just the tea and a toy, but
millions of little things that influence, including from forgotten
events.
If a bird watcher and a rock collector go for a walk together in
the park they may have equally grand times, one due to the birds in
the trees and the other due to the rocks on the ground. Though they
were side by side, they will give decidedly different descriptions of
the walk.
Do you dislike a name simply because it was the name of
someone you couldn’t stand?

****

Even when they experience similar feelings people will usually have
these feelings under different circumstances, if only slightly
different. People will be artistically excited, but for different works
of art or when interpreting differently the same work of art. People
have similar feelings of romantic love, but for distinctly different
people— different looks, personality, culture, interests, sex, race.
The emotional states may be alike, but the objects of desire are not.

****

You cannot separate your biases from your perception, because it is

those biases that help create the perception. Without those biases,
you would have a different perception. Even that childhood toy
affected the movie goer’s perception thirty years later.

****

Humans believe they receive important objective insights, including

cosmic truths, through strong subjective experiences— such as
through the sublime experience of art, epiphany of music, nature,
love, lust, religious experience. The psychological power of these
experiences is considered verification of the ‘truths.’
A question is whether these experiences involve genuine insight

159
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

into external reality or are merely strong biological reactions. Love

and lust themselves, after all, are standard genetic reactions.
Psychological reactions to certain sounds, such as in powerful
music, involve genetics.
The reactions to high delicate notes (such as from song birds or
a pop song) and low booming notes (distant thunder, the start of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony) have been shared by humans for
thousands and thousands of years. You and your ancient ancestor
have remarkably similar psychological reactions to the sound of a
songbird and the sudden deep roar of a bear. It’s no coincidence that
church music uses delicate high notes to invoke heaven in the
audience, and the loud, deep bass of the organ to invoke power and
awe.
It’s not coincidence that horror movies use discordant notes.
The director knows audiences find the sounds scary and creepy.
In the famous 1960 Psycho shower scene, the sharp, grating,
discordant musical notes invoke violence, evil, something gone
horribly wrong. They sound similar to someone scratching a
chalkboard, one of the most despised sounds to humans.
It can never be known to the experiencer that an epiphany made
through a strong psychological experience is anything more than a
genetic reaction. If there is insight into the external, the insight is
shaped by the experiencer's subjectivity, and what parts of the
insight are objective and what parts subjective is unknowable.
Even if important insights into the universe are gained they still
are in subjective format. For example, if your epiphany comes
through your experience of art, your experience of art is personal
and different than that of others. Not only is your ‘insight’
intrinsically tied to your subjective views, you likely would not have
had the insight at that same time, place or format, or at all, if you
had different aesthetic views.

****

Humans use aesthetic rules for defining truths, including what is

good and evil, what is moral and immoral. Common rules include
conditions of beauty, symmetry, color, tone (light versus dark),
fashion and order.
Even if the rules were valid, it would mean truth is subjective.
If truth is beautiful, your definition of what is beautiful differs from

160
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

others’ definitions. Further, an individual’s perception of beauty

changes with time and experience. A culture’s perception of beauty
changes with time. Compare the depictions of the desirable feminine
body from 1450, 1850, 1950 and this year.
Cultural definitions of what is objective, absolute truth are
formed by cultural sensibilities, including fashion, politics, gender,
race, beauty, geography, self interest, desire for social order, etc.
There is no indication these are identifiers of objective truth, or are
even related, but they are still used as criterion.

****

The example of simplicity

To humans, simplicity is that which is simple to them. Simple
matches one’s sensibilities, knowledge, intuition and expectations. If
it didn’t, it wouldn’t be simple. What may be simple to one human
may not be to another. What may be simple to humans may be
simple only to humans.
Simplicity has long been used by humans to define supposedly
absolute things such as cosmic truth, goodness, beauty, logic and
purity. As with beauty, there are a number of problems with this.
There is no proof that cosmic truths, for example, are simple.
Another problem is simplicity, and thus what is defined as cosmic
truth, is in the eye of the beholder.
Normal, even nonconscious thinking involves simplification,
translating complex information into something understandable.
Conceits are simplifications.
Your visual perception involves simplification-- interpreting a
complex scene, grouping and labeling the objects according to your
experience, focusing on what you seem to recognize and ignoring
what you don’t. Visual illusions and mirages shown throughout this
book involve simplification. The scene or graphic is translated by
the viewer into something understandable, an understandable
translation that happens to be wrong. This alone proves that
simplicity is not proof of truth, and that truth isn’t always simple.
Lies are often simpler than truths.
Simplicity, of course, has many practical uses. Scientists strive
for simplicity in theories and testing. A scientific theory that is
needlessly complicated will needlessly confuse students and
seasoned scientists alike. Needlessly muddled theories are harder to

161
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

test, study, correct and understand. In our daily life, good verbal
communication requires simplicity, including using words, phrases
and language the listener understands. If a traveler speaks only
English, it does them no good for you to give road directions in
Spanish. Road directions in Spanish may be simple to a Spanish
speaker, but it’s complicated to someone who doesn’t know the
language.

162
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(29)
Defining Art
In conclusion, good luck with that.

****

When you critique a movie, do you think it important what the

director thought the movie was about and what he was trying to do?
When you read a book or look at a painting is it important for you to
know the artist's intention? Have you ever made an interpretation of
a work of art, later found out what the artist's was and found it
different than yours? What was your reaction?
These types of 'Which interpretation is correct?' questions touch
on topics that have long have been important in aesthetics.
Many years ago the prominent literary school of thought was that
the most important thing in interpreting and studying a book was the
author's intent. This was later rejected, with an influential school of
thought entirely dismissing author's intention and saying all that
mattered was the reading of the text itself. Part of this rejection was
because they no one can reliably know the author's intent. Today,
many scholars find both extremes, well, extreme and fall somewhere
in the middle.
A related school said that a work of literature was a reflection or
representation of the author's biography. Others rejected this, in part
because artists have imaginations, can make up things.
Another school said that art was to be judged by the audience's
reaction to it. There is some validity to this in that art is a
communication. It is intended to communicate ideas to the reviewer,
viewer or listener. Others entirely rejected this idea, saying audience
reaction was irrelevant, and a movie shouldn't be judged by the
reaction of whichever random audience viewed it. Again, most
people today reject the rigidity of both sides. Many think you can't
judge art solely by audience reaction, but that it's relevant.

163
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

All these views beg the question of is there a correct way to

interpret art? Is there even a correct way to determine which way is
the correct way? Art itself is a human made up concept.
In the end, a definition of art is subjective and arbitrary.
Does it even matter whether or not something is labeled as art?
Does labeling something as art change what it is.

****

Yes, I agree. There is something curious about a book on art

perception that doesn't give a good definition of art. Or art
perception or aesthetic perception or aesthetics. Beautiful, isn't it?
I'm proud of myself.
Anyone who gives you the 'real,' 'absolute' definition of art and
points out which works on the wall are and are not the 'real' works
of art is full of it and probably an overbearing know-it-all in general.

****

Our definitions and appreciations of art involve our personal

philosophies about art and even politics and religion. People see
different purposes for art. Some see art as personal expression,
others want it to support common social ideals and order. Some
people want to be merely entertained, while others like to be
challenged. Some are open to new ideas and experiences, while
others judge art by how it reinforces their preconceived
philosophies. Some require historical and factual accuracy in a
movie, while other appreciate that facts are sometimes fudged for
aesthetic purposes.
Art and aesthetics are often used for social order. Dictators
have glorifying statues and murals and set laws for what is
acceptable art. Religions use art to promote their beliefs. Artists
who deviate from the aesthetic rules are often deemed as rebels and
dangerous. Abstract and other modern art has often been labeled as
degenerate by the powers that be. Society pressures people to dress
and style their hair in certain ways. People willingly dress to belong
to or rebel against groups. How you dress says a lot about what you
believe.
Religious beliefs influence artistic form. In early Christian
culture, the importance was given to the afterlife not life on earth. A

164
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

result was the early Christian art was not realistic. On the other
hand, early Chinese religions were centered on nature and the early
Chinese art had much more focus on and realistic depictions of
nature. By Islamic belief, artwork is flawed compared to the work
of God. It is thought that attempting to depict the realistic form of an
animal or person is religious heresy. Thus Islamic art often lacks
realistic humans and other animals, and is noted instead for its
intricate and elaborate patterns and designs.

Islamic design

****

Never underestimate how much your taste in art and your

philosophy and critiques of art, along with your political, social and
religious philosophies, are products of your personality and
temperament.

****

Art perception is both a psychological and an intellectual process,

conscious and subconscious, logical and emotional, and we often
have conflicting and changing opinions about a work. We naturally
get an initial emotional reaction to a work of art-- influenced by our
natural and learned reactions to shapes, colors, textures, etc. Our
impression of the work can change with time. We consciously try

165
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

and figure out what is going on, what is the point, how it is related
to other works. Our appreciation and liking can change as we learn
how it was made, what materials and techniques were used, as we
hear others' views and ideas about the work.
We can like the artwork on one level but not another. We can
appreciate the intellectual point but dislike the aesthetics, or be
attracted to the design and colors but find the artist's message trite.
Our opinion of a work can flip flop back and forth, depending on
which way we consider it.
I hate saying there is the heart and the head in art perception
because, of course, the 'heart' is in the mind. But, if I did, you'd get
the point. But I won't.

****

What does it say visa vie defining and identifying art that your
enjoyment and appreciation of a work often changes viewing to
viewing or listening to listening?

****

People critique a work by first deciding what it is-- its identity,

meaning, genre, how the pieces fit together, what the artist is trying
to say-- then judging that. When someone says a work is trite and
dumb, what he is really saying is his interpretation of what it is is
trite and dumb.
I'm not saying the work can't also be trite and dumb.
Director David Lynch, who never tells his interpretations of his
films, said that over the years he'd heard countless different
interpretations of his movie Eraserhead, none which matched his.

166
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Assignment #1: Answer the question What is your personal

definition of art?

Assignment #2: Pick two works of art that you love or otherwise
find profound and explain why you love them or otherwise find
them profound. The reasons can include it is a genre or style you
like. It could be due to the size or history. It could be due to what it
means, the philosophy. If you connect to a character, it relates to
your past or depicts your home town, explain. If you aren't entirely
sure why, say so.

Assignment #3: What widely acclaimed art do you not like?

Explain why. If it helps, the Mona Lisa doesn't do much for me.
And if you pressed me, I might say “I don't know why. It just
doesn't. Give me a Botticelli any time.”

Just one thing the assignments demonstrate is that you can't fully
explain the reasons behind what you like and dislike. You can love
or hate a work and not be entirely sure why.

167
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

The following three chapters are examples of

aesthetics and related psychology in non-art
areas.

168
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(29)
Fiction in science
Scientific representations are different than the things they
represent. A representation, model or description is a limited view of
the subject, made for a specific purpose, edited by the scientist and
translated into a form the scientific audience can understand and
use. As scientific representations are made by and for humans, they
are part about the scientific subject and part about the humans using
them.

****

A world map is a useful device, but one with a plethora of

differences than what it represents. To start with the obvious, the
world isn’t flat and it isn’t paper thin. These unreal qualities are for
the convenience of the user.
For easy understanding, maps are artificially colored and
marked (latitude and longitudes lines, for example). Road maps
usually make roads appear proportionally wider than in reality, and
remove unwanted details.
All world maps have proportional distortions. For an example
see the map on the following page. Translating anything three
dimensional into two dimensions requires distortions, as three
dimensions and two dimensions are mutually exclusive. Compare
your world map at home to a globe and see the differences for
yourself. There are different methods of mapping the earth, each
method creating its own distortions.

169
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Distortions on maps. As with all types of world maps, this common

Mercator projection map has significant distortions. Greenland is
incorrectly shown as being bigger than Africa. Alaska is shown as
being as large as Brazil, when Brazil is really multiple times larger.

****

The just shown representation of an atom is different than a real

atom in an abundance of major ways. To start, it’s thousands and
thousands of times larger than a real atom. If it wasn’t you couldn’t
see it.
The representation hardy resembles an atom, and the artist

170
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

would agree. The intent was to make a dummy model for students to
learn about the different atomic ‘parts.’ The unreal balls, outer ring
and cartoonish appearance are designed to engage the audience,
simplify things.
As with the map, this representation is part about the subject
and part about humans. It is in a form students can understand. In
this case the form students understand looks more like a Saturday
morning cartoon character than an atom.

****

Any human representation of something complex (and all things are

complex) is simplified and distorted, focusing on a specific area,
quality, layer or angle, made from a limited amount of information,
interpreted by the maker’s sensibilities, presented in a way the
maker and audience can understand.
As a means of communication, a representation will include
conceits of the scientist, audience and even general culture. These
conceits include expected form (pie charts, graphs, book, magazine
article), style, shape, measurement method (volume, height, meters,
liters), color associations (hot = red, cold = blue, forest = green).
It is similar to art, where following the genre’s conceits, even
shallow ones, are constraining but necessary for communication.
The conceits create an artificial representation, but without
them you might as well be communicating in a foreign language.

****

Just as the creation and perception of art involves human

psychology, so does the creation and perception of scientific
representations.
Whether they admit it or not, scientists and philosophers view
the universe and the things in it psychologically. A scientist and his
work can no more escape human psychology than the scientist can
escape being human.

****

All one has to do is to look at a scientific representation, any

representation, and find the human imprint— the human sensibility

171
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

in form, style, color, language, balance, aesthetic choice. A

representation of water may be a magazine article in English.
English language and magazine articles, of course, have to do with
humans and communication between humans.
The article’s subject may be about water, but its form is human.
The article will be read as a work of human literature, as it is a work
of human literature. As an artifact, the article shows about as much
about humans as it does about water.

****

Organize the following into two groups of related objects

Scientists, and non-scientists, often find it convenient and practical

to group information. I asked different people, including a science
professor, to group the previous objects into two groups of like
objects. One person grouped by color (black objects and white
objects), another by size, another by letters (he saw the objects as E's
and C's. Interesting, as I drew the Cs as moons!), another by
direction left or right (problematic as one doesn't know if a moon is
faced left or right). Their reasons for pairing were equally
legitimate, but produced different pairings. This should show you
how one scientist's model can look different than another's, not due
to scientific theory or knowledge but different views of aesthetics,
simplicity and association.

****

This illustrates an essential human problem that goes beyond

science. Humans must translate a subject to understand it, but what
they understand is the translation.

****

172
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

A scientific representation is a product of the scientist’s purpose. A

different purpose will produce a different representation of the same
subject.
I own three maps of North America. One represents the altitude
(mountains, valleys, etc), one shows the traditional aboriginal tribal
regions and one is a road map. Even though they are of the identical
place, each map is different. It’s not so much whether the maps are
right or wrong, but that they were created from different purposes.

****

Many to most scientific representations aren’t intended to be the be

all and end all. Scientists usually consider scientific models to be
works in progress, to be studied, tested, reworked, changed and even
tossed aside as necessary. Science is a continual work in progress.
For testing purposes, models are often intentionally made to be
overly simple. One purpose of such simplification is that errors are
more easily identified and corrected. With a more complicated,
muddled model, it’s harder to identify what is working and what is
not. Another reason for simplification is the scientist may be
studying only one aspect of the subject. The other aspects are
excluded. If a dentist is studying the teeth and gums, there may be
no need for her computer model to be full-bodied, including detailed
feet, fingernails, hair color and bellybutton. It may not even include
eyes and nose, even though people with teeth and gums also have
eyes and noses nearby. She may consider these details distracting
and “beside the point.” A scientist will often be the first to say his
representation isn’t a duplication of the subject, and was never
intended to be an exact duplication of the subject.
As with communicating of scientific ideas to others, reducing a
subject into a simplified if unrealistic model has practical purposes.
Scientific progress would be stunted without simple, artificial
models.

****

Knowing that all representations contain fiction, a question to ask

about a particular representation is whether the fiction is a device
required for communication of ideas, testing or other practical use,

173
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

or is it wrongly portrayed as part of the subject’s innate meaning. If

you are well aware a fiction is fiction, there is no big issue. If you
confuse fiction for fact, that is a problem.
While fiction, the size of the earlier representation of an atom is
needed for humans to see the representation. If the representation
was life size, it would useless to instructors and students. Similarly,
artificial color coding for a diagram or map can make for easier and
quicker understanding. It’s easier to find countries on a map if each
is distinctly colored. These are examples of where the inclusion of
artifice is fair and understandable.
A related question is how seriously is the fiction taken, both by
the creator and the audience. Students and even seasoned scientists
can become too comfortable, too enamored with clichés of color,
shape and words. Through repetition, superficial conceits can
become false idols.

174
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

–- Statistician George E. P. Box

175
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(30)
Mirages

Commonly associated with nature, mirages are visual illusions

where what we see is correct, but abnormal. Mirages in nature are
most commonly caused by unusual bending of light under unusual
air conditions. The view can be so abnormal that the viewer 'can't
believe his eyes.’
The most famous mirage is when it erroneously appears as if a
pool of water is in the desert. More than a few thirsty wanderers
have found nothing but disappointment ahead. The above pictured
water in the road is the same type of mirage. Another related mirage
is when sailors see an upside down ship in the sky. Enough to
convince a pirate to swear off the hooch
These three particular mirages happen when there are abnormal
layers of hot versus cold air that cause the light to refract, or bend,
from its usual course. This bending causes an object to appear in an
unexpected place. In the desert and highway a piece of the blue sky
appears below the horizon, and is wrongly interpreted to be water.
At sea a ship is bent upwards so it appears to be in the sky air.

176
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

A mirage is called a superior mirage where the object appears

above where it normally appears (boat in sky). An inferior mirage
is when the object appears below the where it normally appears (sky
in desert).
The inferior mirage happens when there is hot air near the
ground. It shouldn't surprise that inferior images commonly happen
when the ground surface is hot (desert, summer highway).
A superior mirage happens when there is cold air near the
surface. They commonly appear in the arctic and over frozen water.

****

Sunrise mirage. One of the most striking superior mirages is a

sunrise mirage. These are seen over frigid areas, such as frozen lakes
and seas. The light of the sun is bent upwards along the earth’s
curved surface making the sunrise appear earlier than normal. The
sun is also distorted. Sometimes two suns are seen at once, one
superimposed over the other.

sunrise mirage seen from winter Minnesota

This mirage was noticed centuries ago by Western explorers

stranded in the arctic over the winter. That far north there is no sun
24 hours a day for much of the winter. The explorers were surprised
when the first sunrise of the season appeared days before it was
supposed to. It wasn’t until centuries later that experts realized the
explorers had witnessed this mirage.

177
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

Water can bend light just as air can, the light bending from air to
water or water to air (or air to water to air, etc). A hardboiled egg
distorts from normal appearance in a glass of water. The experienced
spear fisher knows to spear to the side of the image of the fish or he
will miss. Stones appear to ripple and wave in a crystal clear brook.
One can study and demonstrate how mirages work with a drinking
glass.

****

The mirages aren't wrong views of an object, just different. Our

normal vision involves distortions, including to color, details and
angles, so one can hardly claim our normal vision is perfect and
anything different imperfect. When they wish a better look, people
with 20/20 vision intentionally distort their vision with magnifying
glasses, binoculars, periscopes, video cameras and sunglasses.
When you view a bird through binoculars the lens distorts the
light to make the bird appear larger and more detailed. You don't
consider the binocular view of the bird wrong. You consider it to be
more reliable than your naked eye view ("I thought it was a hawk,
but it's just a crow.") A submarine's periscope bends light via mirrors
so a sailor can see above water. The sailor doesn't consider the view
make believe. He considers it a view of reality.

178
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Humans classify views as mirages when they are abnormal and

mysterious (at least to the viewer). There are many brilliant
atmospheric effects that aren't considered mirages, as they are well
understood. Little is more magnificent than a rainbow, but they are
frequent and people know there is a scientific explanation. Fog,
snow, sunsets and seeing our reflection in puddles would be
considered astounding if they weren't common events.
That thousands of pounds of bright white snow changed into
grass in one (hot) weekend doesn’t cause you to write to Ripley’s
Believe It Or Not. You are well aware heat melts snow and
underneath the snow is grass. You mowed that grass a few months
ago. Ripley himself likely had this occur on his lawn numerous
times. The changing of the season is impressive, but only a mirage
to folks who have no memory of it.
After waking up in the morning and seeing the season’s first
blanket of snow, my very young sister turned to my dad and said,
“Daddy, how’d you do that?”
When people move to new geographies they often experience
new weather phenomena. When I moved to Seattle, I experienced
unusual (to me) night lighting effects caused by Puget Sound and
clouds. One night I thought there was a large fire on the other side of
the sound. I later found out it was the lights of a distant hill-hidden
town reflecting off of low clouds. This created a low, fiery glow. I
see this lighting and it no longer fazes me. The first time I saw it, it
was a mirage. Now it's town light reflecting off of low clouds.

179
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

You can't trust water: Even a straight stick turns

crooked in it.
-- W.C. Fields

180
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(31)
Numeral systems and psychology

In some Western Hemisphere high rise buildings there are no

thirteenth floors. Well, there are thirteenth floors, but the floors are
labeled 10, 11, 12, 14, 15 to give the superficial appearance of
having no thirteenth floors. The building owners know many have a
superstition against the numeral thirteen and it’s easier to rent an
apartment or office if it’s called ‘fourteen.’
In Korea and Japan where four is considered unlucky as it’s the
sign of death, some buildings ‘omit’ the fourth floor.

****

Our base-10 numeral system

The common modern human counting system— the one you and I
use-- is based on ten, and is referred to as base-10. It uses 10
different numeral symbols (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) to represent all
numbers, and many popular groupings are divisible by ten: 10, 20,
100, 300, 10,000, century, decade, top 10 lists, golden anniversary,
etc.
Our base-10 system is based on the number of digits on a
human’s hands: eight fingers and two thumbs. As with today, many
ancient humans found fingers and thumbs convenient for counting
and it seemed only natural to base a counting system on the 10
digits.
While the base-10 is a good system and has served us well, ten
as the base was a somewhat arbitrary choice. Our numeral system
could have been based on 3, 8, 9, 11, 12, 20 or other number. Instead
of basing it on the total digits on a pair of hands, it could have been
based on the points of an oak leaf (9), the sides of a box (6), the
fingers on a pair of hands (8). These different base systems would
work. Some might work as well or better than our base-10 system.

181
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Nuclear physicists and tax accountants could make their calculations

using a 9 or 11-base system. Once you got used to the new system,
you could count toothpicks and apples just as accurately as you do
now.

Quick comparison: counting with base-10 versus base-8

The above pictures compare counting with a base-10 system based

on the ten digits of the hands (fingers + thumbs), and with a base-8
system based on just the eight fingers (thumbs not used). Notice that
the base-8 system, not using the thumbs, is missing two numeral
symbols: 8 and 9.
This comparison picture shows how assorted designs (top row)
are counted with the base-10 and with the base-8 systems. As base-8
omits the two symbols 8 and 9, ‘10’ comes sooner when counting in
base-8. In one numeration system, the cat is ‘9’ and in the other is
’11.’ As you can see, the real value of 10, amongst other numeral
symbols, is not an absolute. It depends on what base is being used.

****

Another example of counting with different bases

The following table illustrates how you can count symbols (far right
column) using the base-10, base-9, base-8 and base-5 systems. If
you wish, the symbols can represent physical objects like fruit or
cars or plants. In this table the symbols are constant, while the
numeral systems create different numeral labels for the symbols (or
fruit or cars or plants). For those who consider ‘13’ unlucky, notice
that each counting system labels a different symbol as being 13.

182
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

This counting stuff is not idle abstraction. Civilizations have used

and use different numeral systems.
The Yuki Indians of California used a base-8 numeral system.
Instead of basing their system on the digits on their hands, they
based it on the spaces between the digits.
The Ancient Mayans used a base-20 system, as they counted
with the digits on their hands and feet. They lived in a hot climate
where people didn’t wear closed toe shoes.
Today’s computer scientists use 2, 8 and 16-base systems. For
some mathematical work base-12 is more convenient than base-10.
For this base-12 system they usually use the normal
0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 numerals and add the letters a and b to make
twelve (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b). It goes without saying that these
mathematicians, often university professors and researchers, are
using this system to perform higher levels of calculations than you
or I perform in our daily lives. They aren’t counting change at the

183
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

grocery store.
Our normal lives show the vestiges of ancient numeral systems.
We sometimes count with Ancient Roman numerals (Super Bowl
XXIV, King Richard III), letters (chapter 4a, chapter 4b, chapter
4c... Notice how this combines two different systems, standard
numerals with letters) and tally marks. We group loaves of bread,
inches and ounces by the dozen, and mark time in groups of sixty
(60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour). Counting inches and
ounces by twelve comes from the Ancient Romans. Our
organization of time in groups of 60 comes from the Sumerians, an
ancient civilization that used a base- 60 system.
The traditional counting of bread into groups of twelve has
practical convenience. At the market, a dozen loaves can be divided
into whole loaves by two, three or four. Ten loaves can only be
divided by two into whole loaves. Sellers and customers prefer the
grouping that gives more whole loaf options, not wanting a loaf to
be torn apart. This should give you an idea why feet and yards are
divisible by twelve, and there were twelve pence in a shilling— you
get more ‘whole’ fractions out of twelve than you do ten.
These have been just some examples of other numeral systems,
as there have been a wide and varied number over history. This not
only includes systems with different bases, but with different kinds
and numbers of numeral symbols. In Ancient Eastern countries,
physical rods were used to represent numbers. The number, position,
direction and color of the rod represented a number. In Ancient
Egypt, pictures, known as hieroglyphics, were used to represent
numbers. One thousand was written as a lily, and 10,000 as a
tadpole. The Ancient Hebrews had a similar system to ours, except
they used 27 different symbols to our ten. For the Hebrews, numbers
20, 30, 40, etc each got its own unique symbol.

Ancient Egyptian numerals for 1,000 (lily flower) and one million
(man with raised arms)

184
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Tallying is an ancient basic counting system many of us use. The

practical problem with this system is that numbers like 500 and 10,000
require a whole lotta tally marks. 500 requires 500 tally marks. Over
history, numeral systems have changed and evolved to correct
inconveniences like this. Notice we use the tally system only for simple
tasks, like keeping score in a ping pong game and marking days.

****

A kid’s counting system: Eeny meeny miny moe

Kids have long used counting rhymes to decide who is it. The below
common rhyme does the equivalent of counting to twenty, with the
last word being the twentieth word.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe Catch a tiger by the toe If he hollers let
him go, Eeny, meeny, miny, moe
There are a few interesting things about this eeny meeny
counting system. First, it is quasi base-20, not our normal base-10.
Second, words are used as numerals, or as the practical equivalent of
numerals. Kids could count to 20 for the same practical result, but
they chose to use words. Third, while lucky 7, 10 and unlucky 13
have popular importance compared to other numerals in our base-10
system, the seventh, tenth and thirteenth words in the rhyme do not.
This is an example where a different counting system changes
what numbers are perceived as important. Most kids who count with
this rhyme aren’t even aware which are the seventh, tenth and
thirteenth words.
Humans often say they can’t conceptualize numbers in anything
but the normal base-10, but here is a base-20 words counting system
that we have all used. Granted this counting system is simplistic in
the extreme, used for one and only one purpose— to count to twenty

185
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(moe). You wouldn’t want to try and use it to calculate your taxes.

****

Numerals and human psychology

Humans form psychological attachments and biases for the
numeration systems they use. Having grown up using a particular
system, and seeing all those around them using the same, many
people assume their numeration is absolute and eternal. Before
reading this chapter, you may not have known or thought about the
existence of other systems. Your base-10 system was all you knew,
the prism which you saw the universe. 10, 100 and 1000— popular
products of your base-10 system— are numbers you are attracted to.
Thinking in base-8 or base-7 is foreign.
It’s telling to look at how humans change their perception from
system to system, and how a change of numeration system changes
peoples’ perceptions of things. The perception is not just about the
numeration system itself, but the things the numeration system is
used to count— objects, time, ideas.

****

As the earlier tables showed, a different base numeral system

doesn’t change the accuracy of our calculations or the physical
objects we calculate. However, if we retroactively changed our base-
10 system to a non base-10 system (like say the Yuki’s base-8
system) we would change how humans perceive and react to objects
and concepts.
As with the high rise buildings and the superstitious renters, the
historical changes would be caused in large part by human
perceptions of the numerals themselves rather the things the
numerals represent. No matter what the Mexico City building owner
calls the thirteenth floor, it is the same floor. If he changes the label
on the elevator directory from ‘13’ to ‘9988’ or to ‘789’ or to ‘Q,’ it
is the same floor with the same walls, ceiling and windows and
distance above the sidewalk. The numerologist apartment seekers
aren’t reacting to the floor but to the symbol ’13.’ It should not
surprise that a change to the symbols, such as caused by the
changing to a new counting system, will change their reaction to the
floors, along with many other things.

186
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

With a large lot of stones lined up on a table, changing the

numeral system has no direct effect on the amount or physical nature
of the stones. With a new counting system, the stones would be the
same stones, but many to most would be assigned different numeral
names. While the stones are the same stones no matter what we call
them, human perceptions of the stones change as the stones’ numeral
names change. Under our popular base-10 system, humans consider
certain numerals to be special, including 10, 100, 1000 and 13, and
react accordingly to objects labeled with these names. With the new
numeral representations, humans’ perception and treatment of the
stones will change. If before a person avoided a stone because it
was unlucky 13, in the new system a different stone would be called
13. If in the old system the stone labeled ‘100’ was singled out as
special, in the new system ‘100’ would represent a different stone.

If a human is asked to count and group the stones, the grouping will
change with the different counting system. In the base-10 system,
it’s likely the person would make piles of 10 or 25 stones or similar
standard. In an 8 or 9 base system, the number and size of the piles
would be different. To someone standing across the room, the rock
design would be different. Her aesthetic reaction to the formation
would be different.
This shows that your numeration system isn’t just an objective
observation system, but helps form how you perceive objects. Under
a different system, you would perceive things differently.

The lines separate the same number of coins. The left group contains
30 total coins in stacks, the middle group between the lines has 30
coins in stacks, the group to the right of the right line has 30 coins in
stacks. The coins of each group were stacked by different numeral
systems. This is why the same numbers of coins look different.

187
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

****

Changing numeral systems, changing history

As a numeration system changes how we perceive, organize and
react to things, a retroactive change to the numeral systems would
change human history. The amount and type of change can be
debated, but today’s history books would read different. With a
change to the standard numeration system, time would remain the
same but human marking of time would change. The decade,
century and millennium equivalents would be celebrated at different
times. No Y2K excitement at the same time as we had. Special
milestones, like current marriage 10th or 25th anniversaries, would
be at different times. People who now receive 30 years of service
awards might receive equivalent awards but after a different
duration.
Think of all those sports championships decided in the last
moments, including the improbable upsets and bloop endings. If the
events took place at different times and under different numeral
influenced conditions some of the outcomes would be different. If
an Olympic sprint is decided by a fraction of a second, it’s unlikely
the first to last place order would be identical if it took place the day
before with the runners in switched lanes and running a different
length race. The changes to marking of time and distance would
likely result in different gold, silver and bronze medal winners over
the years. If a horse race was a tie, it is unlikely the same horses
would tie if the race had been run earlier or later in the day or on a
different day over a different length race. Realize that the
change to the numeration system would likely change the standard
race distances, even if the changes were just slight.
Think of all the razor close political elections. If the elections
took place at a different time, even if just a day earlier or later, it’s
possible some would have different outcomes. A few of the
outcomes could have been for President, Prime Minister, judge or
other socially influencing position. Think of all those close historic
battles that may or may not have had a different outcome if started at
different times, using different size platoons and regiments and
Generals who made decisions using different number biases.
Napoleon Bonaparte was superstitious of 13 and made his
government, social and military plans accordingly. Think of the

188
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

influential or not yet influential people who died at relatively young

ages in accidents, from Albert Camus to General Patton to Buddy
Holly. James Dean died in a sports car crash at age 25. Would he
have crashed if he started his drive at an earlier or later time?
Popular perception of the actor no doubt would be quite different if
we watched him grow old and bald.
The powerful nineteenth century Irish Leader Charles Stewart
Parnell would not sign a legislative bill that had thirteen clauses. A
clause had to be added or subtracted before it could become law.
Irish law would have been different under a different numeral
system.

****

United States consumer prices would likely be affected by a

different numeral system, if just marginally. Again, this would be
due to human psychological perceptions of numerals.
Even though most current US sellers and buyers think nothing
of one penny, often tossing it in the garbage or on the sidewalk,
sellers regularly price things at $9.99 instead of $10, and $19.99
instead of $20. Check the newspaper ads. This pricing is purely
aesthetic, intending to play on consumers biases towards numerals.
The shallowness of this 1 cent game is illustrated when it is
used by stores that have a 'give a penny, take a penny' tray, and that
it is used in many states with different sales tax rates. Most people
psychologically affected by $9.99 pricing at home are also affected
by $9.99 pricing when traveling by car across the country. That the
daily change in sale tax charge dwarfs the one cent between $9.99
and $10, illustrates the traveler’s irrationalness.
Under a base-9 numeral system that omits the numeral ‘9,’
$9.99 and $19.99 would no longer exist, and the visually appealing
"one cent below big number" pricing would land elsewhere. In a 9
digit system, it's likely that there would be many $8.88 and $18.88
pricings in newspaper ads, and the same types of travelers would be
attracted to $8.88 and $18.88 prices as they go state to state even
though the taxes change state to state.

****

There are a variety of intertwined reasons behind irrational biases

189
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

towards numerals and numeral systems.

One reason is people form psychological attachments towards a
system, its symbols and the standard groupings of objects made
from the system. A three digit numeral price ($9.99) looks distinctly
different than a four digit numeral price ($10.00), literally being
shorter. One hundred stones grouped into 10 groups of 10 each will
look different than 11 groups of 9 stones each with one left over. It's
the same amount of stones, but their physical designs look different.
There's an aesthetic aspect to how humans view symbols and
groupings.
Closely related reasons are tradition and habit. If you have used
our base-10 system all your life, it's as natural to you as your native
spoken language. In fact words such as nine, ten and decade are part
of your daily vocabulary. If everyone you know uses this numeral
system, the idea of using a different system may not have even
crossed your mind before now. The idea of calculating using a base-
8 or base- 11 system seems strange and even unnatural to most
people because they were raised on base-10.
Another reason behind irrational biases towards numerals is the
seeming, if nonexistent, absoluteness of the familiar numerals.
While the true nature of time, supernatural, war, love and the
cosmos are shrouded in mystery, the numerals traditionally used in
representing these things seem tangible, concrete. Unlike
philosophical abstractions, numerals can be written down and typed
into the calculator. Even little kids can count numerals on their
fingers. That folks like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein used these
same numerals seem to numerologists to indicate the numerals'
potency. Though, if asked, both scientists would agree they could
have used other numeral systems to do their work, and there was
nothing uniquely special about the system they adopted.
Numerals are used only as convenient notations, proverbial
post-its to label objects. They have no absolute, inborn connection to
the things they represent. Whether you call the animal cat or gato it's
the same animal, and whether you call a number 5, five or V, it's the
same number. Whether you count a grove of trees with a base-10 or
a base- 8 system, they are the same trees. If you count and label the
trees a,b,c,d,e,f,g, they are still the same trees. Numerologists
incorrectly assign an absolute meaning and identity to the numerals
that don’t exist.
Even in academia, mathematicians considered to be too

190
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

enamored with the beauty of numbers at the expense of practical use

are sometimes derogatorily called numerologists by applied
scientists like engineers. Mathematicians are as influenced by
aesthetics as the rest of us.

****

Sounds Good
Many Chinese judge numbers as good or bad by what words they
sound closest to. As their pronunciation of 3 sounds closest to their
word for ‘live,’ 3 is considered good. Their pronunciation of 4
sounds close to their word for ‘not,’ so is often considered negative.
China is a huge country with many dialects. As numbers and words
are pronounced differently in different areas, a number’s perceived
goodness and badness depends on where you are. For example, 6 is
considered good in some places and bad in others.

191
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

(32)
Aesthetic perception and
limits of human knowledge
Studying aesthetic perception as it applies to the art, physical and
mental worlds shows us that there are inherent limitations to human
perception, knowledge and understanding of the universe and the
things in it. Our perception, judgment and thought are in part
formed through inborn and learned biases, taste, arbitrariness,
subjectivity, education and personal experiences. Even our senses
involve illusion and unsolvable errors. Just as art involves fiction
and fantasy, so does our perception of the universe and the physical
world around us.
Humans use their aesthetic biases to judge what are and are not
truths and facts. A truth that does not meet one's psychological
expectations and rules for what are truths will not be considered
true, at least not initially. An offered falsehood that meets one's
expectations for what is a truth is often accepted as a truth. This
helps explain how propaganda works.
It is through our distorted view of the world and subjective view
of art that we receive what we consider our profound aesthetic,
spiritual and emotional experiences.
Art artificially manipulates the mind. The artist uses symbols,
colors, shapes, language style and other techniques to play on the
audience's psychology. One significant point about this is that it
shows the mind can be artificially manipulated.
That humans can be affected by the fake, the artificial--
sometimes even more so than reality-- says something significant
about the reliability of human aesthetic perception. Human
emotions and psychology being a direct path to identifying larger
objective truths is at best a dubious notion.
Considering your perception involves cognitive fallacies,
mental margins of error and questionable logic, when a work of art
deeply resonates with you you should be highly wary of it. It took a

192
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

boat load of dubiousness to get there.

****

Visual illusions demonstrate that reality and human perception of

reality are different things. Despite appearance, the middle bar does
not change in color or tone. If you cover up the image so only the
bar is showing you will see this.
Visual illusions also point out the existence of blind spots and
unreliability in our logic and reasoning systems. For those who have
never before seen this image, the rational answer would be the bar
changes in tone. To say it is solid in tone would be irrational. It’s not
that all false perceptions of reality are due to faulty logic, but that
many are formed using what is considered sound logic and
reasoning.
Visual art is visual illusion.

****

Humans perceive and interpret the world in different ways, each

limited. Humans think of things rationally, irrationally, consciously,
subconsciously, emotionally, intuitively, directly, indirectly,
aesthetically, figuratively, literally, 'from the head and from the
heart'-- in a varying combination of these and more. A human can
think rationally one moment and be emotionally swept up by a song
on the radio the next. Math professors fall head over heels in love

193
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

and abstract painters calculate their taxes. These often conflicting

ways of perceiving things can at times make it impossible for a
human to make up his mind.
A human's best possible exploration, understanding and
expression of the universe use all the levels. An interpretation of the
universe through only mathematics or only music is inherently
limited. Many things in the world can't be explained with
mathematics-- love and beauty for examples--, just as mathematics
can't be explained with love and beauty. An explanation using just
one level is flawed.
Over the centuries, and for centuries to come, philosophers,
scientists and thinkers have tried to reconcile the conflicts that arise
by these opposing ways of thinking. They've tried to seamlessly
combine art with logic, religious faith with science, the rational with
the irrational. However, this is impossible. By definition, logic and
illogic, rational and irrational are mutually exclusive. One
undermines the other. They cannot exist in the same point at the
same time. Oil and water. There are irreconcilable conflicts, catch
22s, that the human mind cannot be overcome. These paradoxes
show us the limits of our minds.

The subject of the biographical movie or book is or was flesh and

blood, a life filled with measurable facts: dates, times, durations,
amounts, heights, geography, quotes, test scores, employment
records, mailing addresses. Yet a strict recitation of facts will not
wholly represent the person and her life, much less engage the
audience. A person is much more than facts and dates. Character,
personality, aesthetic vision (perhaps the subject was a great artist),
beliefs, faiths, mental conflicts, contradictions, urges, dreams, fears,
subjective experiences, nonconscious, desires.
A famous composer might say, "If you want to know who I am,
listen to my music. That's all you need." A woman might say, "If you
want to know about me, forget about my high school transcript and
the conversations I have with my boss. Watch my favorite movie. If
you don't get the movie, you'll never understand me." Her favorite
movie probably was made by someone she never met, perhaps who
died before she was born, the movie isn't about her, perhaps takes
place in a country or even planet she's never been to and may not
have a single character that resembles or acts like her or even speaks
her language.

194
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

Even when distorting facts and logic and time, a biography that
is a work of art can, at least in a way, be a better representation of
the subject, his deeper personality and vision. This type of
biography is an aesthetic or psychological representation of the
person, as a Cezanne painting is a figurative representation of a
landscape. Cezanne didn’t intend or expect for the viewer to take the
painting literally.
The essential problem in the biography is that to create this
psychological representation, one must distort the literal truth. And
to tell the literal truth, one destroys this aesthetic truth. The
biographer needs the two to exist together, but they cannot.

****

Humans have vague ideas, psychological inklings, about the mystery

of the universe and life that they cannot fully explain, put their
fingers on. Art can point to these feelings, point to the mysteries of
the universe and to ourselves in a different ways than other forms of
expression. While not solving the major questions, it can perhaps
give insight into them, into humans and the human condition of
living in a universe where they cannot know the meaning or what is
their purpose on earth.
In the end, artworks are artifacts, showing how humans think
and perceive, their physiological abilities and limitations, the
questions they have, the human condition. Aliens from another
planet would lean about us from these artifacts.

195
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

In the introduction I said I wasn't going to give a simple

summarizing theory or final one paragraph conclusion neatly telling
you how art perception works. This is a complex unsolved topic,
neuroaesthetics is still a young field, and I've offered many though
far from all of the contributing factors and concepts. All of these
factors and others work together in aesthetic perception, in different
numbers and amounts, and each perception differs from person to
person and artwork to artwork. Some sections of this book, such as
the chapters on symbols, language and defining art, were short and
could be expanded greatly on, the subject for a paper or book,
perhaps by you.
You are welcome to read more, come up with your own ideas
and theories, think for yourself, examine your own perceptions.
Just realize that art perception involves illusions, just as does our
perception of reality. And even when reading this book, and
thinking about this subject, you can't escape all your illusions and
cognitive biases. A philosopher and scientist can no more escape his
psychology than he can escape being human.

196
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the

less you know”
-– Diane Arbus

Lt. Detective Frank Drebin: “Now, Jane, what can you tell us
about the man you saw last night?”
Jane Spencer: “He's caucasian.”
Captain Ed Hocken: “Caucasian?”
Jane Spencer: “Yeah, you know, a white guy, with a mustache.
About six foot three.”
Lt. Frank Drebin: “Awfully big mustache.”

197
Art Perception * David Cycleback

198
 Art Perception * David Cycleback

David Cycleback is an art historian and philosopher and

internationally known authentication expert. He is a two-time
Eric Hoffer Award Finalist for his books Return Trip and
Conceits. Reprinted by Beijing's Three Shadows Art Center,
his guides Judging the Authenticity of Prints by the Masters
and Judging the Authenticity of Photographs were the first
comprehensive books on the subjects published in China. He
has advised and examined material for major auction houses
and institutions, was an articles writer for the standard
academic reference Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century
Photography and writes an authentication advice column for
Sports Collector's Daily. His other books include Looking at
Art and Artifacts, A Brief Introduction to Ancient Counting
Systems for Non-Mathematicians, Strange Beauty, and
Forensic Light: A Beginner's Guide.

199
Art Perception * David Cycleback

200