Tsion Avital (born February 21, 1940) is an Israeli philosopher of art and culture. Biography Tsion Avital was born to Avraham and Preciada Dorit Avitbol Avital, and grew up in the town of Sefrou in Morocco. Avital immigrated to Israel with his family in January 1951, when he was eleven. He studied philosophy and psychology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then pursued an MA in philosophy focusing on aesthetics, taking additional courses in the Department of Art History. His Master's thesis, "An Outline of Artonomy," was supervised by Yehuda Elkana and Eddy Zemach. While studying for his doctorate, he spent 1971–1972 at the University of Toronto in Canada. In the experimental aesthetics lab headed by Daniel Berlyne, he was able to verify his hypotheses on the structural paradigm in art. His doctoral dissertation, on "Artonomy: a new type of art and its implications for art education in the future" (1974), was supervised by Berlyne and Anatol Rapoport of the University of Toronto, and Moshe Caspi of Hebrew University. Academic career In 1973 Avital was appointed lecturer at Hebrew University. In 1976 he stopped teaching and managed a rubber and plastics plant in the Holon Industrial Zone for five years. In 1982 he resumed teaching at the Faculty of Design at HIT, the Holon Institute of Technology. In 1997 he was appointed Senior Lecturer, in 1999 was granted tenure and in 2003 appointed Full Professor. In 2011 he retired as Emeritus Professor at the Holon Technological Institute. Tsion Avital is divorced and has three children. Artonomy research In his doctoral dissertation Avital claimed that modern art or, all visual non-representational art, both in painting and sculpture, is not art at all, because its works are completely arbitrary compositions, and so they lack a systemic structure which has been the central characteristic of art in the 40,000 years of its existence. He claimed that in order to revive art, a new type of art is needed, that would restore a systemic structure to art, but without returning to figurative art which had been exhausted. He called this art "Artonomy". Actually, from a higher point of view, figurative art and artonomy are the two sides of the same coin: one semantically or content oriented and the other structure oriented. The decisive importance he attributes to the hierarchical structure in art derives from the fact that hierarchy is a universal ordering relation, and