Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Wall Street Journal MAY 22, 2025 - by Max Watman

'WHAT ART DOES': BRIAN ENO'S MIND AT PLAY

The influential musician and producer ponders the nature of human creativity.

Art - as a field of work and study and as a matter of qualitative rather than quantitative value - is threatened, misunderstood and undervalued. No doubt this is because art is not an obvious form of self-advancement - it doesn't make you thinner or, except in very rare circumstances, richer. It does, however, improve you, and What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory by Brian Eno and Bette A. explains how.

All the pretense one might anticipate in a book with both "theory" and "art" in the title is undone by its gestural, playful design and illustration by Bette A., a Dutch artist who illuminates Mr. Eno's discussion of how art is "like a language that changes meaning depending on the listener." Take, for example, her cheerful drawing of hairstyles - they reflect "Bette's Grandma's feelings about haircuts" - which depicts the severe, shaven noggin of someone who "is against something" and a fluffier coiffure for one who "wants to get married." Together Mr. Eno and Ms. A. contemplate the art inherent in "natural" haircuts and the "highly sculpted beehive" that suggests "time, formality, maintenance." Ms. A. is the perfect foil for the king of the art-school rockers.

British popular music of the second half of the twentieth century was profoundly influenced by the U.K.'s post-World War II art schools. While it will surprise no one that Paul Simonon, The Clash's bassist, went to art school, the list also includes John Lennon and Pete Townshend.

The art schools were easy to get into and their teachers were well regarded. The schools' core view has that the postwar world would be creative, incorporating a number of disciplines. Their graduates would be in tune with culture, ready to work in design (both industrial and graphic), fashion, advertising and entertainment, well-prepared for a world in which there was a lot to buy and sell to newly flush teenagers. Mr. Eno, born just after the war, attended Ipswich School of Art, earning a diploma in fine arts from the Winchester School of Art in 1969.

My first glimpse of Mr. Eno was in the gatefold photo of For Your Pleasure, the second album by that glam-rock ice-sculpture of a band, Roxy Music. Shirtless under a black bolero jacket with glistening black feathers at the shoulders, his long hair cropped on top in a sort of "attach electrodes here" style, Mr. Eno's eyebrows arch in sinister sensuality. With his blue eyeshadow and red parted lips, he looks as if he's about to bite. He's holding a guitar, as is everyone in the band, although he played "synthesizer and tapes."

After leaving Roxy Music, Mr. Eno released his first solo record, Here Come The Warm Jets, in 1974. With 1978's Ambient 1: Music For Airports, he invented ambient music - or at least coined the name. His later production credits include work with David Bowie, U2, Genesis and Talking Heads.

Mr. Eno's work has long been concerned with structure or its absence: Both his music and his installation art have focused on nonlinear, nonrepeatable shapes and sounds; in 77 Million Paintings (2006), 296 painted slides are automatically overlaid by a computer program, paired with randomized music in what he calculates to be seventy-seven million possible combinations.

A man who came up with that synthesis might ask himself what art is for. Mr. Eno has been exploring that question for decades, perhaps most notoriously in his encounter with Fountain, the urinal that Marcel Duchamp signed "R. Mutt" and entered in the 1917 Society of Independent Artists show in New York. In 1990 Mr. Eno spoke at New York's Museum of Modern Art as part of a series called High & Low; much of his presentation revolved around his plan to return the urinal to its intended purpose. In a particularly funny slide, he illustrated how a series of linked straws might form a conduit, slipped through the glass that guarded the piece. (He claims to have succeeded eventually, still somewhat impeded by the case.)

What Art Does demonstrates a similar interest in the encounter between people and art. It begins by observing that though humans need to gather food, they don't need to add sprinkles. We must eat, but we needn't design silverware. We require shelter but not wallpaper. Why do we make such things? "If we can't answer that question," Mr. Eno writes, "we shouldn't be surprised when governments marginalize the arts and humanities in education, or when the 'brighter' students are directed away from the arts and into science and tech, or when support for theaters, libraries and concert halls is the first thing to be withdrawn in a financial squeeze."

So Mr. Eno sets out to find an answer. As with his discussion of Fountain, he keeps the conversation well within the parameters of common sense.

And his arguments are irresistible. Art, he says, is a way to explore feeling without creating "inescapable consequences." A graphic chart contrasts the consequential - "war," "not having shoes" and "finding out about your real father" - and the escapable - "a poem about war," "not having shoe tassels" and "finding out about Darth Vader." The second grouping allows you "to take the consequences as seriously and non-seriously as you want."

Art is a way of making feelings happen," Mr. Eno writes, taking issue with the "bad reputation" that feeling is often accorded. "Feelings come before thought and articulation," he asserts. "They are our antennae." Mr. Eno's sensitive antennae lead to what may be his most convincing point: "Play is how children learn. Art is how adults play."

Mr. Watman's novel, Tomorrow, The War, will be published in January 2026.