Ernst Gombrich, one of the leading (Western) art historians of the twentieth century, believes that although human beings have a deep psychological attraction to order, perfect order in art is uninteresting. “However we analyse the difference between the regular and the irregular,” he writes, “we must ultimately be able to account for the most basic fact of aesthetic experience, the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion. If monotony makes it difficult to attend, a surfeit of novelty will overload the system and cause us to give up.”
