Brian Eno at The John Peel Lecture

Brian Eno is an electronic and experimental music composer that started to play with Roxy Music. Considered a visionary and a innovator in many fields of music, he is some very concerned about the rest of artistic disciplines. During The John Peel Lecture he explain the audience his vision of what is the role of the arts in our society.

He starts the talk explaining what is the current situation of the arts field being part of the economic framework being cataloged as Creative Industries. He claims making from the art an industry could be the end of what we consider art. Moreover, it seems that this industry is not considered among the "important" ones: science, technologies, engineers and maths. It is like the rest of disciplines came from those four, and they are considered not serious enough. For instance, professions related to arts are considered luxurious and relaxing, and here is where Eno turn this concepts upside down. "Is art a luxury or does it do something for us beyond that? Is there a way where a situation can make art flourish?"

Scientists agree upon what science is, but it happens the opposite in arts. What are we really doing when creating art or acquiring it? Eno defines: "Art is everything that you don't have to do". In other words, it is unlike eating or just wearing clothes to survive. It is making regular facts like natural body movements or speaking in dance and poems. To make it even more understandable he explains that people spend time, energy and money in haircuts for a reason. And no haircut is random, as, in some way, they make you feel and express that you belong to a particular world where that kind of hairstyle would exist. If they do not like what they have they normally are "on a crisis". The same is applicable to tattoos, slang, etc. Every human being spends time on stylising, but what is the reason? What for? In a science famous website followers had the opportunity to name what is the most interesting scientific question at the moment? And one of the questions was: "Why do we like music?". 

Eno also explains how art flows through us from the childhood, where playing Let's pretend is the way how a children learn and develop, as they are using imagination, a very important part of us that make us create worlds in our minds. Getting into an imaginary world, for instance by reading, you can see through other's eyes and then you can look back at the real world and make comparisons. Therefore, developing imagination is developing empathy. When speaking about this, he also backed his arguments with facts, like in Finland, where the current best educational system is, the system keeps fine arts for some more time in the childhood. They understand imagination is what we are. Without it we would not have buildings, bridges, football, parties, governments, symphonies, etc. Morse Peckham, in his book Man's Rage for Chaos claims: "Art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of the false world such that man may endure exposing himself to the tensions and problems of the real world". Art is a safe place to have extreme feelings and where you can always leave. Art is a reality simulator.

Personally, I really enjoyed this talk because Eno explains very well the importance of arts in our lives without us even knowing. We need art more than some people would like to admit and it is clear that it makes us understand our own personal realities. Paraphrasing him, "children learn through playing and adults play through art". I did not know about Brian Eno and he has been directly or indirectly very influential to other artists I really like, such as Koan Sound. He has been also a great discovery as I knew some of his works but I did not know who made them, like Windows 95 startup music.