Art is a powerful source of understanding and fundamental to creating the future world we want to live in, says Brian Eno....
I was at a dinner a few months ago, and the host’s 15-year-old daughter said, âI really want to be an artist, but my teachers say Iâm too bright and I should go into the sciences.â Itâs an epidemic in our education systems that smart kids are encouraged to go into STEM subjects (science, technology, and math) while others are sent into art streams. I think this is a very bad and dangerous attitude.
The arts are treated in the same way that Victorians treated play: grudgingly. Schoolchildren would get a very small amount of playtime because they considered learning times tables and conjugating Latin more important. At the moment, arts are viewed as nice and pretty, not very important, and certainly not worthy of government funding.
What does âartâ mean? In my definition, art is everything you donât have to do. We have to wear something to keep us warm, but we donât need designer fashions. We have to eat, but we donât need balti curries or nouvelle cuisine. We have to communicate, but we donât have to write poems or songs. We have to move, but we donât have to dance. I suggest that all of those stylistic activities are what we call art.
So when I talk about art, Iâm not just talking about paintings or records. I include things like knitting, cake decoration, and tattoos. All the many things humans do just because they like the feeling of them. Humans have evolved to enjoy the things that do them good, so what evolutionary role does art serve?
Take screwdrivers, for example. The blades are the same, and theyâre made of steel â not marble, chewing gum, chocolate, or even gold. There are few ways of varying that design if you want a working screwdriver, but you can design the handle. Design means making aesthetic choices. What if you made screwdrivers with handles that people loved so much that you gave up on the blade end and just made the handles? Would you then be called a sculptor? Art explores the space beyond whatâs functional.
Children do it through play. And whatâs the reward for playing? Feelings. This feels good, that doesnât. Playing is about experiencing things and discovering how they feel. Whatâs beautiful, ugly, right, wrong, annoying, comforting. Those feelings are your antennae.
As the neuropsychologist Mark Solms said, feelings and emotions are not “fluffy things.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Theyâre much more important than analytic philosophy. Feelings are how we navigate through our important choices: who shall I have a relationship with, which job shall I do, which team shall I support? What children are starting to do when theyâre playing is discover their feelings and learn which ones to trust.
âChildren learn through play, and adults play through art.â
Art is like this as well. Art is a safe place to have feelings. Children learn through play, and adults play through art.
When someone writes a novel, they are doing exactly what children are doing when they play: âLetâs pretend.â Our skill as humans is to imagine worlds that donât exist and how we might feel within those.
Science is how we discover things, investigate them, and see how they work. Art is how we digest things and learn how to deal with the things weâve discovered. Art is safe. Itâs harmless. I can enjoy a book like 1984, even though itâs terrifying â I can close the book. I can leave the cinema. Itâs not real life, there are no repercussions.
Art deepens our understanding of others. When we read fiction, we are exploring the world through different perspectives. We construct convincing narratives that invite us to exercise our ‘theory of mind’. Weâre making worlds, and narratives give us the tools to make big packages of ideas. Artworks become metaphors for a whole cluster of them. If I asked you, âAre we living in 1984 or Brave New World?â we could have a conversation at a level of complexity that would not be possible without us having those shared narratives.
âArt synchronizes a civilization. It gives us a way of knowing weâre in step with each other.â
It’s clear how this works in narrative forms like books and films, but what about non-narrative art forms? Bracelets, cardigans: How do they communicate to us? Whatâs happening when we look at those? A haircut is an example of an artwork we all have. Why do we bother thinking about our hair? A haircut offers some vision of yourself: “I want to know what it would feel like to be this kind of person.” A haircut is a complicated and meaningful artwork. It sits on many different axes of possibilities: cool to wild, radical to conforming, funny to serious, sharp to soft, contrived to natural.
When youâre making a haircut choice, you might not articulate it but youâre navigating a multidimensional space. We read those spaces very well. From blatant signals such as a Trump baseball cap to the kind of glasses you wear (thick frames nowadays if you want to be taken seriously), we live in a world of signs, and they are all about positioning ourselves in relation to the world: who we might be and how we want to live.
Meaning, however, is always dependent on context. Objects have meaning related to previous objects within your experience. Art presents you with a world. It might be huge, like War and Peace, or it might be tiny, like an earring. It says: “How do you feel about this?”
In fiction, you know the states of mind of the characters, so you can make a hypothesis. And because you donât actually know them as human beings, you can say anything you like about them. You can be unkind about them and no one gets hurt.
Art synchronizes a civilization. It gives us a way of knowing weâre in step with each other. A million years ago, all human beings were generalists â they hunted, foraged, built shelters. Nowadays, none of us know how to do any of those things. Weâre specialists. I know how to make records. That would not enable me to survive unless I was able to call on the talents of hundreds of other people who knew how to make chairs, farm milk, or build water pipes.
We donât know about most of the technologies in our lives, but we trust that someone else does. Weâve found a way of smoothing over all of our differences. The human brain has shrunk in size by 15% in the last 10,000 to 12,000 years. Our brains are getting smaller because they are better connected. We use the products of each other’s brains. We are the most interwoven that humans have ever been. Which is paradoxical, considering what a mess we are making.
âArt gives you the chance to let go, to let a feeling wash over you.â
The most important question you can ask yourself is: What do I really like? Every day you see thousands of advertisements telling you what you ought to like, while newspapers and television tell you what you ought to be thinking about. What art asks you is: What moves you? What you respond to is so important when youâre drowning in a sea of commercial messages, images, suggestions, and proposals. What do you want? Itâs worth setting aside 10 minutes every day to think about that.
Art also fosters social discovery, where you realize how the rest of the world is working, what feelings are flowing, and which are âokayâ by common consent. Art also redirects attention. It shines a torch on a piece of the world you hadnât noticed before. This is so important when so much of the world, especially the natural world, is getting lost. Art says: âI know itâs only a little beetle but I love it, and I want it to continue to exist.â
Finally, art is about surrender. People from technological civilizations tend to find it hard to give up control. Art gives you the chance to let go, to let a feeling wash over you. Control is essential but we need to acknowledge the limits. Control can narrow our vision. Art comes under the same umbrella as sex, drugs, and religion. It opens us up. Itâs where you acknowledge youâre not perfect, things are changing all the time, and you have to keep refreshing yourself, surrendering.
Art is central to how we build the world â and in every decision we make, we’re building the future. Would you like to belong to the future weâre building now? Think about that. Think about the future youâd like to live in â and start living it now.
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