Birkhoff’s æsthetics, Arnheim’s Entropy. Some Remarks on Complexity and Fuzzy Entropy in Arts

Art, æsthetic theories seem to be a very good place to test the possible, fruitful inter-action between the new (and technically and conceptually innovative) tools provided in the last decades by Computer and Information sciences on one side and a few deep questions asked by Human Sciences, which apparently seem to be quite impervious to the enquiries carried on with the means of traditional scientific methodology. The very limited aim of the present paper is to test this kind of interaction between fuzzi- ness (measures of fuzziness and information) and art (æsthetic theories), using as a starting point the reconciliation of two old and seemingly contrasting approaches to the problem of æsthetic evaluation. We have tried to condense in the title of this paper some remarks that should be critically reviewed: there are similarities and differences when trying to measure fuzziness and information, and there is some sort of relationship between the informal notion of information and the measures of fuzziness.