{"id":2533,"date":"2017-11-08T12:56:50","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T09:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=2533"},"modified":"2017-11-08T12:56:50","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T09:56:50","slug":"brian-eno-humanity-starts-with-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/2533\/brian-eno-humanity-starts-with-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian Eno: Humanity Starts with Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

I want to talk about two questions tonight. The first one is, is art a luxury?<\/strong> Is it only a luxury or does it do something for us beyond that? And the second question is, is there a way that you can create a situation in which the arts flourish.<\/strong> If you think they\u2019re important, perhaps you should be encouraging them in some way. So those are the two things I\u2019m going to address: now to address those I have to come round it in quite a long way around.<\/p>\n

Essentially I think we need to rethink how we talk about culture: rethink what we think it does for us and what it actually is. We have a complete confusion about that. It\u2019s very interesting.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

If you talk to 20 scientists \u2013 and this is the experiment I\u2019ve done by the way – and say to them, ‘what do you think science does?’, they pretty much all agree. You\u2019ll get 20 versions of a very similar answer. It\u2019s to do with understanding something about the world. If you talk to 20 artists and you say to them, ‘what do you think art does?’ you will probably get about fifteen different answers. And there\u2019ll be a couple of repeats.<\/p>\n

So here we all are engaged in the creative industries, but at the centre of this is a subject that none of us really have a very clear idea about. What are we doing when we make art, and what are we doing when we consume it?<\/em> So I\u2019m going to start with a definition of culture.<\/p>\n

This is treading on very thin ice because a lot of people have attempted this and a lot have failed. So I\u2019m going to make a quite narrow definition of culture. And I\u2019m going to call culture the creative arts. But I\u2019m going to make a very broad definition of what art is. And my definition is quite simply art is everything that you don\u2019t have to do<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Now what I mean by that is that, there are certain things you do have to do to stay alive. You have to eat, for example. But you don\u2019t have to invent Baked Alaskas or sausage rolls or Heston Blumenthal. So you have this basic activity that we and all other animals do, which is called eating, but then unlike all other animals, we do a lot of embroidery and embellishment on top of it. We make eating into a complicated, stylised activity of some kind.<\/p>\n

You have to wear clothes. But you don\u2019t have to come up with Dior dresses or Doc Marten boots or Chanel little black frock, whatever it\u2019s called. You can tell I haven\u2019t got one. So, once again we have an essential need – clothing ourselves \u2013 which we then do with intense sort of interest. We stylise and embellish and ornament and decorate.<\/p>\n

Movement. We have to move. But we don\u2019t have to do the rumba, the tango, the Charleston and the twerk. So even something as straightforward as movement we, as humans, elaborate it into area of stylistic activity, essentially. So the basic activity is movement. What we like to do with it is to stylise it in lots and lots of different ways.<\/p>\n

And communicating is the same way. You know, we all have to communicate, because we\u2019re humans and we live in co-operative groups. But, in fact, we do a lot more than just communicate: we write epic poems and pop songs and symphonies and advertising and so on and so on. So, again, with communicating we do a lot of additional stuff on top of just communicating.<\/p>\n

And all of that stuff, what\u2019s characteristic of it is that it\u2019s highly stylised. And it\u2019s not only highly stylised, but it\u2019s not randomly stylised either. We care a great deal about what we\u2019re doing. For instance, people will say to you \u2013 and almost mean it \u2013 ‘I wouldn\u2019t be seen dead in that’. Or they might say, ‘I don\u2019t think I could live without my Bjork albums’. Or similar things like what. ‘What colour shall I dye my hair? It\u2019s a real crisis.’ So people invest a lot of their thinking into how they style themselves. And, in fact, we all show that. Nobody here is dressed randomly and nobody \u2013 I can\u2019t see you very well \u2013 but I don\u2019t think anybody has a random hair cut either. If anybody does, I would really like to see it.<\/p>\n

So I think there\u2019s a whole lot of things that we do which you might just call stylisation. But what I want to persuade you that they are actually part of this very broad definition of art as I\u2019m using it. I made a list of things that I would put under that umbrella. Symphonies, perfume, sports cars, graffiti, needlepoint, monuments, tattoos, slang, Ming vases, doodles, poodles, apple strudels, still life, second life, bed knobs and boob jobs. All of those things are sort of unnecessary in the sense that we could all survive without doing any of them, but in fact we don\u2019t. We all engage with them.<\/p>\n

So the first question is, why is any of that important? Why do we do it? And notice it\u2019s not only us relatively wealthy people, in terms of global wealth, who are doing it – it\u2019s everybody that we know of. Every human group we know of is spending a lot of their time \u2013 in fact almost all of their surplus time and energy \u2013 is spent in the act of stylising things and enjoying other people\u2019s stylisations of things. So my question is, what is it for?<\/p>\n

In fact, my friend Danny Hillus, who\u2019s a scientist, was asked by a well-known science website, along with about 300 other scientists, he was asked what is the most interesting scientific question at the moment? A lot of the other people replied with things about the cosmological constant and Ryman\u2019s Hypothesis and all these very complicated things. And his question was very simple: he said why do we like music? And if you start thinking about that, that is really one of the most mysterious things you can imagine. Why do we even have an interest in music?<\/strong> Why do we have preferences<\/em>? Why do we like this song better than that one? Why do we like this Beethoven sonata better than that Beethoven sonata? Why do we like this performance of that same sonata better than that other performance?<\/p>\n

We had very fine distinctions about things that we prefer, aesthetic things. And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say. So, as I say, we\u2019re all doing it and we\u2019re all thinking about it. What are we actually doing?<\/p>\n

So I want to look at what children do. If you watch children playing what they\u2019re doing mostly is ‘let\u2019s pretend’. Let\u2019s pretend this stick can change you into a frog. But if you have this bottle top and you shine it at me, I can\u2019t fly any more. Something like that. Those are the kind of games that children like to play. And they play them absolutely incessantly. And everybody sort of intuitively knows that children playing is important. It\u2019s how they learn. We also know that if we don\u2019t let children play, they don\u2019t develop well. It\u2019s the process of acclimatising that a child is going through.<\/p>\n

So, when a child is saying ‘let\u2019s pretend’, what they\u2019re really saying is ‘let\u2019s imagine’. Imagining is possibly the central human trick.<\/strong> That\u2019s what distinguishes us from all other creatures.<\/p>\n

We know from quite careful study now that the amount that other animals can imagine is very, very limited compared to ours. We can imagine worlds that don\u2019t exist. We can not only imagine them, we can imagine what is going on within them. We can change details, we can say ‘okay, I\u2019ll make it this instead of that and then see what happens’. So we can play out whole scenarios in our head in imagination. And that, of course, makes us able to experience empathy, for example. By definition, empathy is having the feeling of what the world is like in somebody else\u2019s head. Well you can only do that, really, if you are skilled at this job of world-building.<\/p>\n

And children start world-building as soon as they can do anything. They start it very, very young indeed. So they\u2019re exercising this great talent of imagination. They\u2019re becoming humans, actually. They\u2019re growing out of being animals and they\u2019re becoming humans.<\/p>\n

And they spend a lot of time doing it and until we send them to school and tell them to actually start learning, they\u2019re doing fine at it. I often wonder what would happen if we just let them carry on doing that. Sort of like they do in Finland, I think, which has the highest educational attainment rate in the world, I believe. In Finland you don\u2019t start to learn to read until you feel like learning to read, which can be seven or eight years old. Anyway, I wouldn\u2019t go on about education, sorry. There\u2019s a lot to get through.<\/p>\n

But I do want to keep this idea of imagination in mind that the thing that humans are doing, especially young humans are doing, when they play, is imagining. They\u2019re learning to imagine. They\u2019re learning to think about how other worlds could be.<\/p>\n

You think about this world by imagining alternatives to it. And you think, of course, about futures by imagining how the world could turn out. It could be like this. If this happens, it could be like that. This is why we can make bridges and have football teams and design weddings and have parties and have governments and so on and so on – because we can imagine those things.<\/p>\n

Now my first point is to say that children learn through play, but adults play through art.<\/strong> So I don\u2019t think we stop playing. I think we just carry on doing it, but we do it through this thing called ‘art’.<\/p>\n

And so the reason I made that big list of things – which could, of course, have been endlessly long – was because I want to say that all of those things, from the most exalted (with inverted commas) like symphonies, to the most mundane like cake decoration or nail painting or something like that, they are all doing the same thing. They are all the construction of little worlds of some kind. Okay, so you\u2019re thinking how\u2019s nail decoration a world?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start in the obvious sort of example. Novels and films. It\u2019s very obvious when you read a novel that what you\u2019re doing is immersing yourself in another reality of some kind.<\/p>\n

You know, if you read Little Dorrit or something by Dickens you\u2019re in the 19th century, you\u2019re in the culture of debtors\u2019 prisons, the poorest people in London. And the effect of that, of course, could be dramatic on a reader. It was very dramatic on Dickens\u2019 readers, most of whom were probably people who hadn\u2019t experience debtors\u2019 prisons and who were shocked by what they read and who developed a kind of empathy for the people portrayed there. So they suddenly understood that there was a class of people that they had not seen much of, tended to ignore who, to their surprise, had the same sorts of feelings that they had: the same triumphs and the same disappointments.<\/p>\n

So, in that case, you know, the immersion into a world has a distinct social effect. It makes you understand that those other people don\u2019t live in quite the same world as you and to have some sympathy for the one that they are in.<\/p>\n

Similarly a novel by, say, Neil Stephenson or Will Self or somebody like that, builds a world that doesn\u2019t actually exist, that never existed. It\u2019s a new world, it\u2019s an imaginary world. Once again, by immersing in that, you are not only increasing your ability to imagine and flex your muscles, your mental muscles in worlds, but you\u2019re also always looking back at the world you\u2019re actually in. Making comparisons. So I think it\u2019s easy to see in those cases books, films, things that have words essentially, what the message is. That you\u2019re being invited to enter a world and enjoy it and learn something from it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not so obvious in, for example, hair styles. So I like hair styles as an example because we all have them \u2013 well not quite all of us. But if you think about what\u2019s going on when you choose to wear your hair one way rather than another, what you\u2019re really doing is saying I belong to this particular world where this kind of hairstyle would exist. You\u2019re broadcasting something, but you\u2019re also very alert to all the other hairstyles that you see around you. So you\u2019re in receive mode as well. And what I think you\u2019re doing then is you\u2019re positioning yourself in all the possible stylistic worlds that could exist, you\u2019re taking a certain position. And that\u2019s an identification for yourself, it\u2019s an identification for other people as well.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an American aesthetician called Morse Peckham who I was very interested in. He wrote a book called Man\u2019s Rage For Chaos: Biology, Behaviour And The Arts. And he says in it, ‘Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world in order that man may endure the tensions and problems of the real world.’ So I\u2019d actually go a bit further than Peckham \u2013 probably even as far as Bromley or Lewisham \u2013 and say it\u2019s also the exposure to the joys and freedoms of a false world in order that we might recognise those and locate them in the real world.<\/p>\n

So, I like this idea of art having a serious function in our lives and I think this might be one of them. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s the only one, by the way, but I\u2019ve only got 40 minutes…<\/p>\n

When you go into a gallery, you might see a most shocking picture. But actually you can leave the gallery. When you listen to a terrifying radio play you can switch the radio off. So one of the things about art is, it offers a safe place for you to have quite extreme and rather dangerous feelings.<\/em> And the reason you can do that is because you know you can switch it off. So art has a kind of role there as a simulator<\/em>. It offers you these simulated worlds \u2013 a little bit like a plane simulator, you know – the reason you have simulators for learning to fly a 747 is so that you don\u2019t crash too many 747s – you can have a crash and get out and laugh. Well it\u2019s true of art as well.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a book by an American historian called William McNeil. It\u2019s a very, very nice book called Keeping Together in Time. And its subtitle is ‘Dance And Drill In Human History’. And in that book he talks about the intense pleasure humans feel in muscular coordination: in dancing, in marching together, in carnivals, in all the things where a lot of people synchronise themselves…<\/p>\n

You know, we live in a culture that is changing so incredibly quickly. I was thinking about this the other day and I thought probably in a month of our lifetimes we have about the amount of change that there was in the whole of the 14th century. So we have to somehow come to terms with all of that.<\/p>\n

None of us have the same experiences: you know you might know a lot about what\u2019s happening in cars and you might know a lot of what\u2019s happening in medicine and you might know something about mathematics and you might know something about fashion. None of us are at all expert on everything that\u2019s happening. So we need ways of keeping in synch, of remaining coherent. And I think that this is what culture is doing for us and as I said, culture is the creative arts so far as I\u2019m concerned.<\/p>\n

So, I\u2019m starting now to propose the idea of culture as a sort of collective ritual, or a set of collective rituals that we\u2019re all engaged with. So this is a short explanation of why I think the arts are worth pursuing for other than GNP reasons… The most important thing is that we have been altogether \u2013 that doesn\u2019t mean just ‘the artists’, so called, it means everyone, it means all the people actually in the community, everybody \u2013 has been generating this huge, fantastic conversation which we call culture.<\/em> And which somehow keeps us coherent, keeps us together. If you will accept that that might be correct, then you might also think well, it sounds pretty important, that job.<\/p>\n

So how does it come about, how do ideas come about? Where does art come from? Is it just out of thin air, as libertarians and laissez faire-ists tend to think? Romantics as well. They imagine that people like Beethoven walk about with symphonies in their head and they all sort of just burst out into reality by some unstoppable, divine force. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s how it happens.<\/p>\n

And I went to a show about 25 years ago now, at the Barbican. Of early-20th-century Russian painting. It was an area of painting that I particularly loved \u2013 in fact it was my period, really, that I loved thinking about and looking about and I thought I knew quite a lot about it. I went to this show at the Barbican and there were probably 150 artists in there, including all the big names like Kandinsky and Tatlin and Rodchenko and so on and so on. And I would say that 70 of the artists in there I\u2019d never heard of. And they were really good. And I thought that\u2019s so mysterious, why didn\u2019t I know about any of those people? And so I thought there must have been so much going on at that time and the differences between the ones who survived into history \u2013 like Kandinsky \u2013 and the ones who you\u2019ve never heard of, was very small. There were a lot of people making great pictures then. So I thought how did that come about? Why was there so much going on at that time? And I started reading about that period in history in Russia.<\/p>\n

Well, one of the reasons that went on was because it had a lot of help<\/em>. There were a lot of collectors. They put a lot of money into the scene, but there were a lot of hangers-on as well. What would normally be called hangers-on.<\/p>\n

There were people who had nice apartments that artists could meet and have parties in, or people who rented salons. There were people who had empty places where you could have a show. You know, even if you weren\u2019t very well known. There were galleries that went out in competition with one another to poach the newest, the best young artists. There was a whole thriving scene around the artists themselves. And that thriving scene was actually what produced all this work<\/em>, I think.<\/p>\n

I came up with this word then. Which I still use, which is the use scenius<\/strong>. So genius is the talent of an individual, scenius is the talent of a whole community. And I think, you know, in history you see many examples of great sceniuses, like that point in the Renaissance when Rafael, Michaelangelo and da Vinci were all alive at the same time and in the same cities. Or British pop culture, actually. British pop culture in various times has been that kind of scenius where suddenly all sorts of talents and opportunities came together. And you get something that is actually an ecosystem.<\/p>\n

Now, this thing about ecosystems is that it\u2019s impossible to tell what the important parts are. It\u2019s not a hierarchy, you know. We\u2019re used to thinking of things that are arranged in levels like that, with the important things at the top and the less important things at the bottom. Ecosystems aren\u2019t like that. They\u2019re richly interconnected<\/em> and they\u2019re co-dependent<\/em> in many, many ways.<\/em> And if you take one thing out of the ecosystem, you can get a collapse in quite a different place. They\u2019re constantly rebalancing.<\/em> And I feel that culture is like that. And I think that British musical culture in particular has been like that.<\/p>\n

So my thought the other night, when I was walking home was, new ideas are articulated<\/em> by individuals, but generated<\/em> by communities. What we tend to do is \u2013 perhaps quite naturally \u2013 celebrate the individuals. We\u2019re very keen on the names. But what we don\u2019t do is to look at the whole community that they\u2019re drawing from.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m going to give you as an example of this my own story in a very potted form.<\/p>\n

Usually when people tell their story, they make it seem like they did it all themselves. ‘I did it my way. I\u2019m a self-made man.’ It\u2019s particularly notable among high-tech billionaires who tend to think that they started the world. So my story is like everybody\u2019s story and very complicated and I\u2019m just going to look at certain particular parts of it.<\/p>\n

When I was 11, I passed the 11 Plus and because I was of Catholic parents I got a scholarship to a Catholic Grammar school. Like many schools, it had set aside a few places for bright, working-class boys I believe was the phrase. Then I went to art school. The art school was free. We didn\u2019t pay fees then. I spent five years at art school. Absolutely invaluable time. I studied with some great teachers, some of whom, incidentally, had taught Pete Townshend, who was one of the first in this series of lectures.<\/p>\n

I left art school and I went on the dole. This was a very important part of my life. And I went on the dole because I desperately didn\u2019t want to get a job. Because I was worried if I got a job, I would never get out of the job.<\/em> And I wanted to be an artist. I was very clear about that.<\/p>\n

So I stayed on the dole and doing odd jobs and had the great good fortune of meeting Roxy Music. So I had luck. Joined a wonderful group of people. And then, another great piece of good fortune… that John Peel came to one of our early shows, and put us on the radio. A writer called Richard Williams heard it, wrote about it. A big piece. Which was pretty unknown at the time because we didn\u2019t have management record company or even fans, actually. And then, of course, John Peel was one of the reasons I\u2019m here, actually, because he was a key figure in my life. And then the other thing that I should mention that kept me going during that time was the NHS and the Library Service.<\/p>\n

So, I mention all of those things. They\u2019re not the only things in this story, of course, but they\u2019re important in a way because they were all institutions that had been set in place a long time ago by people who had some sort of idealistic notion of social engineering. Lord Reith, setting up the BBC, had the idea that the whole nation would benefit from being a part of this new idea of radio, that ideas could be spread around differently. A lot of the way people are talking about the internet now.<\/p>\n

The scholarship system was a piece of social engineering from some sort of long term generosity of mind of the people who set up that school. The dole, you know, why does the dole exist? It exists because somebody thought it was repulsive that people should be poor in a society where there was a lot of money going around, that some people should be very, very poor. It seemed objectionable. Doesn\u2019t seem objectionable to a lot of people these days, which is interesting. So these forms of social engineering appeared and, as I say, I think they represent a sort of altruism, a generosity towards the future, which I think is just starting to find its time now.<\/p>\n

We are now in a new era. We come from an era of scarcity, basically, economic scarcity – and when all of economics is based on the idea of scarcity and the idea of competition for resources. What we\u2019re moving into, I think \u2013 this is explored in Paul Mason\u2019s book Post Capitalism and in David Graber\u2019s books and various other people are writing about it. What we\u2019re moving into is an era of abundance. And co-operation. We\u2019re super-productive, we\u2019re going to become even more productive as we automate, and we\u2019re going to become even less connected to the production, because automation means robotisation and it means that humans are less necessary to that process.<\/p>\n

So, what are we all going to be doing? We\u2019re going to be in a world of ultrafast change.<\/em> It\u2019s really accelerating at the moment and will continue to. And we\u2019re going to have to somehow stay coherent. What are we going to be doing? I think we\u2019re going to be even more full-time artists than we are now<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

And I don\u2019t just mean the professionals like me, I mean everybody, is going to have to be constantly involved in this activity that I was describing earlier of being able to resynchronise<\/em> with each other, to connect things together,<\/em> to be able to make adventurous mind games about different futures,<\/em> to be able to understand things.<\/em><\/p>\n

There are some interesting social initiatives now. There\u2019s one called Basic Income. I don\u2019t know if you have heard of that. This is the idea that everybody should get a wage. Everybody. Whether they work or not. So that we simply eliminate poverty in one step like that. There would be no more poor people. You think ‘Jesus, that sounds ridiculous.’ It isn\u2019t ridiculous, actually – you might want to read about it.<\/p>\n

Another thing that tells you about the future we\u2019re moving into is the open-source movement. Where people, instead of producing ideas, carefully defending them, and keeping all the rewards from them are starting to share ideas… Altruism. Altruism has a kind of a new face. Writers like William McCaskill are starting to think let\u2019s get rational about altruism. We have to be more altruistic…<\/p>\n

So, all of these challenges require us to constantly be remoulding ourselves…<\/em> What we tend to do is we get a sense of what everybody else is thinking about things and we sort of work out our attitudes in relation to everybody else, as we generally think quite collectively. I think it\u2019s good that we do. I think it\u2019s very important that we have more and more of the mechanisms for doing that. This is why I think we need to be thinking about art and culture not as a little add-on, a bit of luxury, but as the central thing that we do…<\/p>\n

________<\/p>\n

Excerpts from Brian Eno’s BBC (John Peel) Lecture, 2015, with paragraph arrangements and emphasis added by ELLOPOS BLOG<\/a>. Cf<\/em>. Brian Eno @ Amazon<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I want to talk about two questions tonight. The first one is, is art a luxury? Is it only a luxury or does it do something for us beyond that? And the second question is, is there a way that you can create a situation in which the arts flourish. If you think they\u2019re important, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[5,46],"tags":[1950,387,3066,5761,2202,5760,5762,2089],"class_list":["post-2533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-philosophy","tag-brian-eno","tag-children","tag-creativity","tag-humanity","tag-imagination","tag-philosophy-of-music","tag-playing","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}