Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, RDIis an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, writer, and visual artist. He is best known for his pioneering work in ambient and electronic music as well as his influential contributions to rock, worldbeat, chance, and generative music styles. A self-described "non-musician," Eno has advocated a methodology of "theory over practice" throughout his career, and has helped to introduce a variety of unique recording techniques and conceptual approaches into...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMusic Producer
Date of Birth15 May 1948
When I was at art college, the teachers who helped me were not the ones I agreed with, or the ones who encouraged me, but the ones who took very strong positions. Because if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don't agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it - or chuck it away if they don't want it.
One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.
People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
I've always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I'll sort of listen to the "lie" and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true...what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.
Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.
I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
Culture is everything you don't have to do.
Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.