Brian Eno was thinking about the purpose of art a decade ago, as evidenced by his 2015 John Peel Lecture (previously featured here on Open Culture). But he was also thinking about it three decades ago, as evidenced by A Year with Swollen Appendices, his diary of the year 1995 published by Faber & Faber.

This year, that same house is bringing out What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, a new book on that very subject written by Eno, in collaboration with the artist and novelist Bette Adriaanse, better known as Bette A. It deals with the questions Eno lays out in the video above: “What does art do for us? Why does it exist? Why do we like art?”

These matters turn out to have preoccupied Eno “since I was a kid, really,” when he first got curious about a “biological, psychological explanation for the existence of art” — a drive not so readily followed, it seems, by young people today.

Eno relates a conversation he had with an acquaintance’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who said to him, “I wanted to go to art school, actually, because I really love doing art, but my teacher said I was too bright for that, so I should go for science subjects.” He sees it as “the death of a culture, when you take the brightest young people and stop them from thinking about a huge area of human activity.”

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