MFA exhibit showcases a collector who says he has unlocked a secret of design - using math

Designed objects, Brock writes, can be broken down into “themes” and “transformations.” A theme is a motif, such as an S-curve; a transformation might see that curve appear elsewhere in the design, but stretched, rotated 90 degrees, mirrored, or otherwise reworked.

Aesthetic satisfaction comes from an apprehension of how those themes and transformations relate to each other, or of what Brock calls their “relative complexity.” Basically - and this is the nub of it - “if the theme is simple, then we are most satisfied when its echoes are complex . . . and vice versa.”

Complex theme, simple transformation: Voila! The chair is beautiful.

In his great novel, “Herzog,” Bellow warned against “the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations.” Keeping these cautionary words in mind, I prefer - rather than seeking the truth of beauty - to subscribe to something the philosopher Gaston Bachelard once wrote: “The world is beautiful before it is true.”Read more at www.boston.com