[hcarvalhoalves]

I believe the author got it backwards. I don't think most artists follow the Golden Ratio (at least not consciously, or since this appeared in literature), as much as this ratio has a tendency to creep up over and over on people's works.

I have a theory about this, and it has relation to ocular dominance [1]. People who photograph or shoot firearms might know about this: our brains tend to favor one of our eyes (just like left/right hand dominance), so we have a kind of overlap where the image we see is not 50/50 between each eye. That might point to a mental bias to find slightly unbalanced compositions (that approach the GR) more pleasant than completely balanced ones.

The last sentence - that we find unbalanced compositions actually more balanced - is empirical, not just speculation from my part. Any artist knows that intuitively too.

I don't know if there are papers about that, if you know please comment!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocular_dominance