The John Peel Lecture by Brian Eno [ Lecture ]

Today I finished watching an extrmely inightful and thought provoking lecture on the ecology of culture by Brian Eno. In the lecture he talked about his views on the relationship art has with society and discussed the ideas that he had on the future.

He first adressed the issue that the education sector favour 'Stem' subjetcs over the arts and beleive they have more value and greater importance in the real world. Stem relates to Sience, technology, engineering and mathemics, and even the imagery surrounding the word stem relates to the central 'core' subjects that everything grow from. 

The most interesting points he made I noted down (there are a lot) :

Ask 20 scientists what the meaning of science is and you'll get 20 different variations of the same answer. Ask 20 artists the same question and you'll get 15 different answers of what art is as their is no clear definition. 

His attempt at defining art is that: 'art is everything you don't have to do'.

You HAVE to eat but don't have to invent baked Alaskas.

You HAVE to wear clothes but don't have to wear Chanel dresses and Doc Martins.

Art is essential needs embellished.

Movement is essential but you don't have to dance.

Humans elaborate the basic activity of movement and stylise it.  This is art.

Communication - additional stuff like poetry, singing, novels. This is art.

We care an awful lot about how we style ourselves and invest a lot of time and effort into it. 

We could all survive without doing any of these things but we still do it and want to do it. Everybody on earth. Almost all time and energy is put to stylising things and appreciating other peoples styles. 

One of the biggest questions in science is 'why do we like music?'. Why do we have preferences? We have very fine distinctions on the things we prefer. Nobody knows but it is important to us.

Children like to play 'let's pretend' and that is the most valuable way in which they learn. 'Lets imagine' is the central human trick that distinguishes us from other animals. We can imagine worlds that don't exist. And play out whole scenarios. Experience empathy by feeling what the world is like in someone else's head. Children start world building as soon as they can, growing into humans rather than animals at an early age. 

Finland lets children learn by playing and imaging things til an older age and doesn't force them into things like reading until they want to. However studies show that this method works as Finland have the best grades. 

Imagination is the basis of everything creative. Designing wedding cakes, building governments, creating football teams etc. and art is the grown up version of 'playing'. The construction of little worlds. 

Another defining feature of art is the way it gives us a chance to have feelings about things that aren't dangerous. It's a safe place to have extreme and dangerous feelings. Acts like a simulator, simulating worlds that you can switch off. 

William McNeal 'dance and drill in human history' explains that humans experience extreme pleasure when people synchronise themselves - dancing, carnivals. 

Old ladies talking about corrrie on the bus are synchronising. 

In a month of our lifetimes the same amount of things change as in the whole of the 14th century.

Everyone has an interest in one thing that's happening. No one is an expert on everything. Culture (the creative arts) is a collective ritual we are all engaged in. And this is the only way we can synchronise is this fast paced, ever changing world.

Eno's definition of culture is coherence between the community. 

Scenious (a word invented by Eno) is the 'talent' of a whole community. The community is an Eco system, we feed off each other- everyone is important and everyone thrives together. Co-dependant and  rebalancing. Richly interconnected. Take one thing out and it collapses.

New ideas are articulated by individuals but generated by communities. Praise always tends to go to the individual but they couldn't have done it without the community that they drew from. 

Genius- talent of an individual. 

Social engineering of things like NHS, BBC, the dole. Set up out of Generosity for the future. We are moving into era of abundance and cooperation and things are going to accelerate and we have to find new ways to remain coherent. 

Constantly remoulding ourselves by getting a sense of what everyone else is thinking collectively.  Formulte your own opinions off that.

Art and culture is the central thing that we do, not just a little add on. 

Barbara errenwrights 'dancing in the street' quote shows how we all need to start communicating together more to acheiev happiness and coherance in life.  

Interesting points made in the Question and Answer Included:

'Technology are the things that don't work properly let' grand pianos and bicycles work but aren't considered technology. The problem is keeping up with new technoogy. 

Technology and art is going to kick us onto a new evolutionary level.

Sapiens: A brief history of human kind, by Yuval Harari talks about the 3 defining  revolutionary moments in mankind.

Cognitive revolution is where we started talking to each other and forming languages. The 2nd is Agricultural revolution where we started making cities and civilisations. The scientific revolution, is where we manipulate the world how we want it and learn to contort it. Now we are entering post human revolution. We start to build the future with beings more intelligent than us. Utopia but some people have to let go of the profits. 

All of the increase in productivity is going right to the top end of the scale. Graph 3" by 2" . 80% people at the bottom of the graph living on 2-4 dollars a day, then it goes up sharply at the end of the graph to the 20% that live in the rich west. 

If graph was to scale the end of the graph would have been 23 stories high. 

We can't keep going that way the wealth is too ridiculous. 

I took away so many interesting points from this lecture and plan to research into 
the German experiment where everyone got a living wage and had time to indulge in culture eg. reading the books you've been meaning to and watching films etc. 

Also want to look more into the graph on World wealth.