François CholletVerified account

The surest way to have zero success in visual arts or writing is to draw/write what's in your heart. Good art follows a small set of rules.

Every rule can be broken, and you can be successful by "only" following a majority of them -- not any single of them is a requirement

But breaking a significant number of rules just makes your life considerably harder. You'll need to compensate with intuition -- genius

These rules are kind of an open secret. Easy to find out, yet few seem aware of them. On top of my head, I can list 10 of them for painting

Everytime I draw something, the response is directly proportional to how many rules I was following. 8/10: great success. 3/10: no one cares

Follow the rules = redundancy, Break the rules = entropy. According to Cybernetic Aesthetics the sweet spot seems to be around 6.5/10.

Funnily enough, the ratio between novelty and the expected is part of the rules. The rules are higher-level -- not a formula.

and I think the correct ratio is 8/10, or maybe 7 something