What is the Visual Brain for?
Why do we need to see at all,’ His answer to this question is that ‘We see in order to gain information about the world’ and he believes that art is part of that same system. I don’t think that goes far enough and will develop my own ideas later. He says that art has an overall function which is remarkably similar to that of the visual brain, is indeed an extension of it and that, in undertaking its functions, it obeys forcefully the laws of the visual brain’. The complexities of the further arguments are not appropriate for this short talk. But I could recklessly try to sum it up by saying that as the brain subconsciously has to select and represent its perceptions of the physical world in an understandable manner to the conscious and even unconscious areas of the brain, so art must and does select, transform and edit its possible images, again so as to make the world or the gaining of information about the world contained in images manageable, efficient and relevant to the needs of t
