The best quotes from Brian Eno's John Peel Lecture
As expected from one of the great thinkers on not just music but art, culture and technology, 's provided many pearls of wisdom on a wide variety of subjects. Here are just a few quotes from the lecture by the former man, ambient music innovator, producer and fine artist. .
"This is the beginning of the end of the arts, if we start to make things expressible by single numbers"
Brian Eno introduces his John Peel Lecture
Brian Eno poses his questions for the John Peel Lecture.
Eno began by contemplating what the creative industries are and the danger of qualifying artistic endeavours in numerical terms. Does that mean that things that can't be specifically valuated are worthless? Of course not! Eno's lecture sought to answer two questions: Is art a luxury, and, is there a way in which you can create a situation in which the arts can flourish? First, though, a definition of what art is...
Eno meant that there are certain things we have to do to stay alive, like eating, but that we don't need "to invent Baked Alaskas or sausage rolls", which we do simply because we can. Likewise with clothes, which we need, but we don't need fashion. Also...
Is art just stylisation, then? Eno thinks not, adding that he counts the following things as art: "Symphonies, perfume, sports cars, graffiti, needlepoints, monuments, tattoos, slang, Ming vases, doodles, poodles, apple strudels, still life, second life, bed knobs and boob jobs." Things we like, in other words, depending on our tastes. But why do we like them? To answer that, Eno considered the behaviour of children...
He went on to discuss how each artistic endeavour is about creating "little worlds", whether real or imaginary, and both aid learning. With all art - even something as seemingly simple as a haircut - you're exposing yourself to the "joys and freedoms of a false world in order that we might recognise those and locate them in the real world". In essence, then...
And also that...
But we don't always express art alone. A synchronicity almost always occurs; art itself is a kind of dance that we do together - a "collective ritual". And regarding that, Eno has his own phrase...
British pop culture was, and is, a scenius, Eno added - an ecosystem in which there are no hierarchies. And who recognised that better than almost anyone else in British pop culture?
Eno ended by considering the future:
"What we're moving into is an era of abundance and cooperation. We're super-productive; we're going to become even more productive as we automate and we're going to become even less connected to the production, because automation means robotisation and humans are less necessary to that process."
So what will we be doing? "I think we're going to be," said Eno, "even more full-time artists than we are now."
