61. The Brain and Creativity

Modern abstract art is considered complex and the extraction of meaning from some works of art is largely controversial. However, some artists have explicitly tried to produce paintings in accordance with specific goals. This means that behind their artwork there is a project realized through creativity. Their paintings clearly reflect those efforts and are able to show the emergence of complex ideas reproducing a non-linear and uncertain world. This chapter investigates the link between brain-states of a subjectʼs perception of art with the complexity of the art. More than 25 paintings of famous artists of modern art are studied and evaluated. The concept of artistic complexity, C_A has been introduced as a metric for assessing the complexity of paintings of different artists. The results achieved have been compared to the saliency maps earlier introduced in computer vision as computational models of bottom-up VA. The measure proposed is based on an interplay between top-down and bottom-up approaches, manifesting the difficulty of the human brain in extracting invariants from some abstract representations. The intriguing relationships shown may offer a paradigm for testing novel computational models on brain-like machines. The methodologies described are likely to be of interest for multimedia quality assessment as metrics able to emulate the integral mechanisms of human visual systems as well as to correlate well with visual perception of quality.