Tsion Avital

Avital's second book is: The Confustion between Art and Design: Brain-Tools versus Body-Tools. Washington; Vernon Press (2017).

Avital's first book is : Art versus Non art : Art out of Mind, Cambridge University Press (2003). The central issue of this book is to re-establish the demarcation lines between art and quasi-art by anchoring the nature of art, as all other main branches of culture, in the structural properties of mind itself. In 2009 this book has been published in Chinese, and in 2018 it was published in Spanish.

Between the years 1974–1985 Avital initiated a number of exhibitions in Israel in which the principles of Artonomy in various arts were demonstrated, by Avital as well as other artists. It is worth noting that while all scholars who employ structuralism in their fields use it as an explicative method. Avital argue that artonomy seem to be the only case in which structuralism is applied for both; explicative and generative method in art. Before the formulation of artonomy by Avital, there was a premature attempt to introduce systemic thinking in art. In 1966 the Guggenheim Museum in New York presented an exhibition entitled "Systemic Art".

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 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.

Tsion Avital (born February 21, 1940) is an Israeli philosopher of art and culture.