Tsion Avital

In the experimental aesthetics lab headed by Daniel Berlyne, he was able to verify his hypotheses on the structural paradigm in art.

In 1976 he stopped teaching and managed a rubber and plastics plant in the Holon Industrial Zone for five years.

Actually, from a higher point of view, figurative art and artonomy are the two sides of the same coin: one semantically or content-oriented and the other structure oriented.

[2] The decisive importance he attributes to the hierarchical structure in art derives from the fact that hierarchy is a universal ordering relation, and is the most general principle of order existing in the universe at all levels: macro and micro, in the physical, biological, social and noetic world.

[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] Avital thinks that Figurative art served as an adequate and comprehensible depiction of things, real or fictitious, for tens of thousands of years just because it represented things in the world in a hierarchical order employing self-embedded pictorial symbols.

From the moment that hierarchical order was erased from art, it also ceased to be a medium for the depiction of reality or anything else, and became arbitrary daubing of paint or at best, trivial graphic design.

[18][19][20] Avital argue that artonomy seem to be the only case in which structuralism is applied for both; explicative and generative method in art.

Before the formulation of artonomy by Avital, there was a premature attempt to introduce systemic thinking in art.

After his total disillusionment with aesthetics theory and years of groping in the dark with no solution, Avital decided to look in a completely different direction: to investigate in prehistory how art was born, in the hope that in its fetal stages it would be easier to discern its most basic characteristics.

After over twenty years of groping in the dark with no solution, a significant turning point for him was the discovery by Mary Leakey[23] and other researchers who discussed the discovery of a trail of footprints left by hominids in Laetoli, in the north of Tanzania, 3.8 million years ago.

Second, he showed why reading of footprints is apparently the origin of painting, as well as the first case where meta-structures of the mind find expression.

Understanding of the cognitive mechanisms necessary for reading the footprints led to Avital's most important finding: mindprints theory and they are the central axis of all his life's research.

Avital claims that these mindprints that were necessary to read footprints four million years ago, and are necessary today to read footprints, are the same qualities necessary for making stone tools 2.6 million years ago,[28] prehistoric art, language and its derivatives, technology and science.

Determinism–Indeterminism (Probability, Selection, Choice) Over time, the level of abstraction and sophistication in the application of these patterns became more and more complex.

In contrast, argue Avital, abstract art does not relate any things, but is a special case of a mass of colors and forms with no reference outside themselves.

The second part of the book presents the theory of mindprints, and shows how it can be applied in order to distinguish in a fairly clear manner between art and pseudo-art.

Avital's second book was The Confustion between Art and Design: Brain-Tools versus Body-Tools, Washington; Vernon Press (2017).

Since the beginning of the twentieth century artists have reduced figurative painting to graphic design but called it "abstract art".

In both cases, the artists reduced the figurative symbols to their perceptual components; color and form, or to objects and therefore art ceased to exist as a visual language and in fact became a design of one kind or another.

As a result of the total blurring between art and design, there is complete confusion between the two domains, which is detrimental to both fields.

In light of these comparisons, the inevitable conclusion is that art and design are two different and independent domains of opposed character.

The book demonstrates that art and design belong to two domains of two different levels of reality.