There's a paper by Schmidhuber [1] in which he argues, IIRC, that not the surprise as in high or just-right entropy is what satisfies the observer of e.g. art,

There's a paper by Schmidhuber [1] in which he argues, IIRC, that not the surprise as in high or just-right entropy is what satisfies the observer of e.g. art, but the fact that it teaches you a new, previously unknown pattern of regularity about the world which allows you to compress information better. I may be misconstruing it though b/c it's been a while since I looked into it. On another note, Brian Eno has cited Morse Peckham's "Man's Rage for Chaos"[2], which seems to be more in line with what you are saying and to claim that the purpose of art is offering surprising shifts in perspective that break up the otherwise overly strong drive towards order and predictability. 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4552798-man-s-rage-for-chaos https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4552798-man-s-rage-for-c...