Brian Eno explains why humans make art
Few figures in popular culture have explored the possibilities of creativity quite like Brian Eno. With one foot in the world of popular music and the other in the far-out reaches of experimentalism, Eno could always add a cerebral edge to even the most basic of compositions. Whether it’s creating his own version of lunar orbit or giving U2 the tools to rise above their post-punk roots, Eno has forged a singular path that truly deserves to be called art.
Being the naturally curious mind that he is, Eno has spent a fair amount of time pondering why humans feel the need to express themselves through art. While giving his keynote speech at the Green Events and Innovations Conference earlier this year, Eno stumbled upon a question that came out of a most unexpected place: the British soap opera EastEnders.
“A few years ago, I was on a bus on Kilburn High Road and, sitting behind me, were two ladies who had obviously been watching EastEnders the night before,” Eno explained. “And they were talking about one of the sort of moral crises that EastEnders had just exposed them to: it was a story about a young woman who had come out as gay. And they were discussing this issue, whether she should have come out, whether it’s okay to be gay, whether she should have told her parents before she told her fiancé, the man she was about to marry, and I realised that you could probably only have a conversation like that about somebody you didn’t know, about a fictitious character.”
“So art is a sort of way of creating fiction that we can share and discuss,” Eno added. “So, for instance, if I say to you, ‘oh, god, I had a terrible morning – it was like being in 1984‘, referring to the George Orwell book, you would immediately know what that meant and what type of world I was discussing. And it occurs to me that one of the things we do as a culture, as a global culture, is think about those fictions. We share those fictions with one another, and we wave views about them, and we can exchange views about them completely safely – they’re not dangerous. The main thing about art is that it isn’t dangerous. You can do mad things and then shut the book.”
“And it’s that possibility of using art as a place where we try out ideas. We try out other ways of being. You know, ‘I’m gonna wear my hair completely mad today’ and be a different person for a day. It doesn’t matter. It’s safe. So, in a way, art is a safe zone, psychologically. It’s a place we created in order to to be different people living in different worlds. Because that’s what we do as humans – we experiment with other ways the world could be. That’s actually why we keep creating new worlds.”
You can check out some of Eno’s art down below.
