Art is ...

Updated 7. August 2016

Eno spoke at length about his definition of art and culture, and its continued importance in an era increasingly focused on STEM values—science, technology, education, and math—where it can sometimes feel as though the goal of our education leaders and politicians is simply to train a new generation of C++ programmers.

Eno had made an essential point about the role of art in both creating and making sense of social transformation.

“We’re going to be in a world of ultrafast change,” he said. “It’s really accelerating at the moment and will continue to. And we’re going to have to somehow stay coherent. What are we going to be doing? I think we’re going to be even more full-time artists than we are now.”

Author Steven Johnson interviews Eno. The following are two parts of the interview:

TRANSCRIPT:

Johnson: You have this amazing definition of art, that’s maybe the best definition I’ve ever heard.

Eno: Well, it used to be my definition of culture. I used to say culture is everything you don’t have to do, because there’s the anthropological meaning of culture, meaning, you know, kinship and religion and language and all that sort of thing, and then there’s the capital-C version of culture, which means stuff we call art. But what I mean is something actually in between those two. I call art everything that is the sort of stylistic overlay to the things you do. So, for example, you have to wear clothes, but you don’t have to wear Levi’s or Yves Saint-Laurent, or Coco Chanel. So there are a lot of elaborations that we make on top of the things we have to do. And, in fact, a lot of our time is spent on those elaborations.

We spend a lot of our thinking time in the world of style. And I call all of that artistic activity. Some of it is very obviously artistic activity — there’s no reason for making a painting, other than for it to be a painting. But it’s a little bit different if you get things like cake decoration or cardigan knitting or something like that, where there’s also a functional layer. So the only difference, as far as I’m concerned, between fine art and, let’s say, craft, is the amount of stylistic interest there is in the piece. The quota, the quotient of it that is stylistic. As I say, a painting doesn’t exist for any other reason than to be a painting, unless you were using it to cover a hole in the wall, of course, which you could do—that would be a rare example of a functional painting. Or you could encode a treasure map in it or something like that, or an insult to somebody, but generally speaking, paintings don’t have a job other than to be pictures, to be purely stylistic experiences.

Johnson: Once you expand the definition from painting and ballet all the way to cake decoration and hair styles, you realize that there’s a massive amount of focus and energy and emotional investment in that layer.

Eno: It’s the biggest business … If you think of all the things that come under that now-enlarged umbrella. Think not only of the music business and the art business and the film business and the record—all the media—but think of things like cosmetics, for example. A vast, huge business, which is all to do with stylistic activity of some kind. So yes, it’s a very big area, and of course the question I am always wondering and have been always wondering about it is why do we do it?

Why do we have such an interest in this, and spend so much time doing it? Because, first of all, it’s universal. We don’t know of a human group that, as soon as they can just keep body and soul together, they start becoming stylistic in their behaviour. This goes right back to 50,000 years ago, when people start cave painting and making little sculptures and so on. You think, why were they doing it? And why was anyone else interested in the fact they were doing it? Because it seems always, as far as we know, in every society, people who can do that are valued. They’re sometimes treasured, actually. In our society, they’re paid a lot of money, which is the only way we express value in anything.

Music has never been figurative. It’s the only art form, if you think about it, that has never had a figurative history. Painting, even back to cave painting, it’s paintings of things. Sculpture the same obviously; literature has always been about things; stories about things. But music seems to come out of nowhere and is about nothing in particular, even though, if you get classical albums, they always try to say the sound: “Beethoven captures the sound of the babbling brook,” and it’s all complete bollocks, and everyone knows it. It’s only because records were 12 inches square and they had to fill the back up with something. They needed some words.

TRANSCRIPT:

Eno: The problem with talking about art, I think, is that there’s still a hangover from romantic assumptions that art intrinsically has something. I don’t think art intrinsically has very much at all. I think nearly everything that it has is conferred upon it by our collective history of experiencing art. So we create the value.

I think when something is exciting to you, a picture or a piece of music, what’s exciting is that you’re hearing the latest sentence in a conversation you’ve been having all your life. When you look at a painting, you don’t just see that painting, you see every other picture you’ve ever seen. That painting is in the context of every picture you’ve ever seen.

So, it’s, when I do a talk about this sometimes, a lecture, I do a quite good trick — I have projected on the screen behind me, because I draw things and so on as I’m talking, and in the top left corner of the screen is this little sentence that says “I used to have a car like that.” And I don’t ever draw attention to it or mention it. I just carry on doing, but the sentence is always up there, and at a certain point I’m talking about the idea of … a piece of art being the latest—or the most final for you at that moment—statement in this long conversation you’ve been having. And then I tell this story about this American guy who came to England to discover his ancestors, who came from Devon. And he was driving around Devon, he was a very wealthy Texan actually, and he sees an old farmer sitting, leaning on a gate, and he says, “Is this your land?” And the farmer says, “Yeah it is. It goes all the way from top of the hill there down to the river. That’s all mine.” And the Texan laughs and he says, “If I get up in the morning I can drive all day before I get to the other end of my land.” And the farmer says, “Yeah, I used to have a car like that.” And the point is, until you hear the rest of the story, the sentence makes no sense at all. You don’t know what it’s about. And I think one of the first things to understand about artworks is they’re all punchlines. They’re all the latest sentence in the story, and they don’t make sense in the abstract.

So … first of all, you are never looking at one piece of art — you’re looking at it in terms of a huge context, the whole of the rest of the joke is there, you know, so this thing slots in. So what you’re aware of are differences. Now, once you understand that, it’s much easier to understand what music is doing. Whatever you’ve heard, you might never have heard anything as soft as that, or as angular, or as loud, or whatever it is. And of course those properties have meaning to you, you know. When I first started making ambient music, the first thing reviewers noticed was everything that was missing. Doesn’t have a beat, it doesn’t have a melody, doesn’t really have any chords, doesn’t have words. So, all it had was space, actually, and that’s what people picked up on. They’d never heard music with as much space as that, actually. So, the difference was both what it was missing and what it therefore had as a result.

Johnson: I’ve been thinking about this way of thinking about music as basically controlled surprise — that we have this deep evolutionary instinct to be interested in surprising facts about the world. When we make a prediction, that this is going to end this way and it doesn’t, our brains are wired to pay attention to it. So that keeps up searching out new sounds, or new melodies, or new formal possibilities, because we have to be surprised on some level.

Eno: But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that you can re-experience that surprise lots and lots of time and still love it. Whereas if I told you that joke again, it wouldn’t be so funny, would it? And if I told it to you a third time, you’d start to get fed up with it, and if I told you 150 times … “Hey, I’ve got a really good one, this guy comes over from America to find his roots in Devon, he meets this farmer …” So it’s interesting to me—

Johnson: It has this long half-life, somehow.

Eno: Yes, yes, that’s right. Music can actually remain, as I can attest to now, exciting for 40 or 50 years. You still like it, so there’s obviously something more complicated than my punchline theory going on as well.