Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Record Collector JANUARY 2025 - by Jeremy Allen

BRIAN ENO/BETTE A - WHAT ART DOES: AN UNFINISHED THEORY

Didactic explainer from revered polymath

Eno, the self-described "non musician" in Roxy Music, has made a career of confounding expectations since those heady days of glam rock in the early 1970s. Just last year, he reinvented cinema with a regenerating eponymous documentary that's never the same movie twice. While his first book in twenty-nine years doesn't reinvent the form or the wheel, it does concern itself with the act of creation and our part in it, explaining concepts so simplistically at times that you wonder if he's trying to sell you a bridge. What Art Does... takes a look at the feelings art itself imbues in us, explaining in clear terms how it makes the world a better place, with the charming squiggles of Dutch artist Bette A adding to the sense of clean, uncluttered lucidity. At times, Eno makes cybernetics look easy, using haircuts, earrings and the driving of buses to help us comprehend the importance of culture and community, deep diving into the complexities of how society holds together so that we don't have to. Quirky and thought-provoking, it should be a prescribed text for schoolchildren across Britain, and it wouldn't hurt if it fell into the hands of the odd culture secretary, either.