# The Pleasure of Patterns in Art  ## Metadata - Author: [[The MIT Press Reader]] - Full Title: The Pleasure of Patterns in Art - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Art gives us pleasure by showing patterns and shapes that our brains enjoy recognizing. Caillebotte’s painting uses triangles and repeated shapes to create a feeling of harmony and depth. Like good poems or music, these visual rhymes make art meaningful beyond just what we see. - URL: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/why-repetition-in-art-pleases-the-brain/ ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > When the French painter Paul Delaroche first saw a daguerreotype in 1839, he is supposed to have said, “From today, painting is dead.” He must have been coming from the view that the image was all. From that starting place, it is not unreasonable to ask, *What is the point of going to all the trouble of making an image on canvas when a camera can do it much more accurately and much more efficiently?* Obviously, Delaroche’s five-word obituary for painting was, like reports of Mark Twain’s demise, premature. But why? What is it about painting that has kept photography from slaying it? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kfgvgb6cn0tn59kh5sy547vb)) > Repetition of the *same/except* variety appears elsewhere, most notably in the cobblestones. By “same/except,” I mean a visual relationship in which forms are clearly similar, yet slightly varied, so the brain perceives both sameness and difference at once. In other words, objects share a recognizable pattern but are never exactly identical. This interplay between repetition and variation is central to how we perceive structure, rhythm, and depth across mediums (more on that later). With the cobblestones, for example, the closer they get to the lower left-hand edge of the painting, the more elongated they become, thereby lending a ramp effect to that portion of the painting, inviting the viewer to step in and enhancing the sense of depth that the painting exudes. But repetition appears elsewhere as well. Notice the facades of the visible buildings. Their windows, parapets, and balconies are repeated over and over again. This is obvious in the original image. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kfgvmz5qsm10sf0qjx5g2gba)) > There is one more property of *Rainy Day* that I would like to draw attention to, one that has nothing to do with triangles. It has to do with parerga. An interesting line of inquiry in aesthetic theory concerns the *parergon*. What is a parergon? Kant gives one definition in his “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment”: > > Even what is called ornamentation (parerga), i.e., what is only an adjunct and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of the object, in augmenting the delight of taste does so only by means of its form. Thus it is with the frames of pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces. But if the ornamentation does not itself enter into the composition of the beautiful form — if it is introduced like a gold frame merely to win approval for the picture by means of its charm — it is then called finery [i.e., decoration] and takes away from the genuine beauty. > So Kant distinguishes between ornamentation, something that is related to the subject but is not central to it, and finery (decoration), something that detracts from the beauty of the object. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kfgvv0jx3fg1tsp24f9235g0)) > I do not think that it is stretching the point to suggest that Caillebotte’s “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” Poe’s “The Raven,” and Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll” are works of art from three distinct genres each appealing to the same cognitive function: namely, the ability to make *same/except* judgments establishing repetitive patterns, the detection of which, per Margulis, elevates one’s aesthetic enjoyment. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kfgw429dcc5gm56gt2vf426e))