Brian Eno Explores What Art Does in a New Book Co-Written with Artist Bette A

Bri­an Eno was think­ing about the pur­pose of art a decade ago, as evi­denced by his 2015 John Peel Lec­ture (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture). But he was also think­ing about it three decades ago, as evi­denced by A Year with Swollen Appen­dices, his diary of the year 1995 pub­lished by Faber & Faber. This year, that same house is bring­ing out What Art Does: An Unfin­ished The­o­ry, a new book on that very sub­ject writ­ten by Eno, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the artist and nov­el­ist Bette Adri­aanse, bet­ter known as Bette A. It deals with the ques­tions Eno lays out in the video above: “What does art do for us? Why does it exist? Why do we like art?”

These mat­ters turn out to have pre­oc­cu­pied Eno “since I was a kid, real­ly,” when he first got curi­ous about a “bio­log­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal expla­na­tion for the exis­tence of art” — a dri­ve not so read­i­ly fol­lowed, it seems, by young peo­ple today. Eno relates a con­ver­sa­tion he had with an acquain­tance’s fif­teen-year-old daugh­ter, who said to him, “I want­ed to go to art school, actu­al­ly, because I real­ly love doing art, but my teacher said I was too bright for that, so I should go for sci­ence sub­jects.” He sees it as “the death of a cul­ture, when you take the bright­est young peo­ple and stop them from think­ing about a huge area of human activ­i­ty.”

Clear­ly times have changed since Eno’s youth, when art school could be a gate­way to mak­ing a per­ma­nent mark on the cul­ture. With What Art Does, Eno and Adri­aanse set about cre­at­ing a book that could eas­i­ly be read by a bright teenag­er — or even her teacher — and con­se­quent­ly clar­i­fy that read­er’s think­ing about the impor­tance of art. Eno has been dis­cussing that sub­ject for quite some time, and to Adri­aanse fell the “thank­less task” of read­ing through his many writ­ings, lec­tures, and inter­views in search of mate­r­i­al that could be dis­tilled into a sin­gle, pock­et-sized book.

Eno clar­i­fies that What Art Does is not an expla­na­tion of the whole of art, nor does it rep­re­sent a defin­i­tive answer to the ques­tion implied by its title. It’s more impor­tant to him that the book expands the swath of human endeav­or that its read­ers con­sid­er to be art. “Cre­ativ­i­ty is some­thing that is born into humans,” he says, and the goal is “reawak­en­ing that, say­ing to peo­ple, ‘You can actu­al­ly do it. What­ev­er it is, it’s your thing, you can do it.’ I like to say, it’s every­thing from Cézanne to cake dec­o­ra­tion.” As “the place where peo­ple exper­i­ment with their feel­ings about things” and come to under­stand those feel­ings, art can hap­pen any­where, from the painter’s ate­lier or musi­cian’s stu­dio to the hair salon and the bak­ery: all set­tings, Eno’s fans would sure­ly agree, that could ben­e­fit from the occa­sion­al Oblique Strat­e­gy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bri­an Eno on Why Do We Make Art & What’s It Good For?: Down­load His 2015 John Peel Lec­ture

Eno: The New “Gen­er­a­tive Doc­u­men­tary” on Bri­an Eno That’s Nev­er the Same Movie Twice

Bri­an Eno’s Beau­ti­ful New Turntable Glows & Con­stant­ly Changes Col­ors as It Plays

Bri­an Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Cre­ative Work: Don’t Get a Job

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

David Byrne Gives Us the Low­down on How Music Works (with Neu­ro­sci­en­tist Daniel Lev­itin)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.