Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

David Remnick (0:10)

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

For decades, Brian Eno has been a hugely influential figure in the music business, particularly in the studio. He's produced hit after hit with U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, and many, many others. But he's also known as a kind of musical philosopher, a guru of the soundboard. Here's The New Yorker's music critic, Amanda Petrusich.

Amanda Petrusich (0:47)

Brian Eno is an English musician and producer, whose career is so vast and adventurous, it really can't be easily encapsulated. But here's my best shot. After leaving the glam rock band Roxy Music in the early 70s, he released a series of extraordinary solo records. Somewhere along the way, he essentially invented, or at the very least named ambient music, which is what we now call any minimalist electronic composition. But for me, it's really just kind of a thing that you feel in your body, in all the soft and tender places that go untouched by thought. That idea of tapping into something less thinky and more instinctive is present in everything Eno does. Eno's work has been a funny kind of North Star in my life. He's someone who's obviously thought quite deeply about art and love and culpability and desire and duty and risk and what it means to honor the very wild fact of your existence.

David Remnick (1:47)

Amanda Petrusich spoke with Brian Eno about two new records that have just come out in his new book, What Art Does.

Brian Eno (1:58)

I was an art student. I went to art school for five years, and in fact, I got my degree in fine art. And like many others of my generation, I then immediately joined a band.

That's how it worked then. And I was always interested in this fundamental question of, why do we make art? It's a completely universal human activity, but we don't seem to know very much about it at that fundamental level. This question, I've been aware of it for ages, that people think art is a luxury. We're very used to the idea that humans respond to pain and punishment. We avoid things that are going to hurt us. But I think we're also guided to a huge degree by the things that we find beautiful, or awesome, or striking, or impressive, or all the words we might use. I think we very much want to be guided by those things as to where to go. My friend John Hassell, who died unfortunately three years ago, I think now, used to have a great phrase. He said, one of the most important questions you can ask yourself is, what is it that I really like? And that seems like a trivial, self-indulgent sort of question. Oh, what do you really like? Well, but it isn't actually, because we live in a world now where 10,000 people a day are trying to tell us what we ought to like. Be they advertisers, press barons, TV companies, politicians, influences. It's very, very important that you remember what it is that you actually really like. That's your guidance. That's your lodestone, as it were.

Amanda Petrusich (3:54)

Brian, you're giving me goose bumps. You're right. It is, in many ways, the only question that matters. It reminds me, well, it brings me back to love, which is an experience that requires surrender, which is another theme in the book. You point out that a fixation on control ultimately makes a person's world very small. You write, the raw wild world develops and leaves us behind playing solitaire on our phones.

Brian Eno (4:18)

When I started to notice that nearly all of the things that humans regard as peak experiences, you know, being bowled over by a piece of music, being knocked out by a sculpture or a dance or something like that. So love, art, religion, sex, drugs, all of those things are situations where we willingly let something happen to us that is slightly beyond our ability to comprehend and control. We surrender. I think a lot of the art experience is about surrendering. And that's the point, you know, the whole point is being moved, having feelings. One of the realizations I had when I was writing this book is that really the only product of art is feelings. Its main point is to make your feelings change, is to give you feelings that you perhaps didn't have before or did have before and want to have again.

Or want to experiment with. So it seems very simplistic to say, oh, it's all about feelings. But actually, I think it is. Feelings are overlooked by all of those people who think bright children shouldn't do art. They're the same people who think that feelings are the sort of irrelevant part of life, sort of simple minded and inarticulate and can't be quantified. Feelings are rather slippery, undefinable stuff. I think feelings are the beginning of everything. It's our first line of contact with the world.