OUGD402 The John Peel Lecture with Brian Eno

Brian Eno's BBC Music John Peel Lecture 2015:

Brian Eno was an art student in the 60's, he become part of the Roxy music group as their keyboard player. He became an iconic electronic performa, playing synth with many famous artists, it was even said that he was Bowies muse as he was so influential. He is an extremely interesting man as he doesn't believe in setting goals, instead he just does things. I myself have never been one for setting goals so this was interesting to see that if you are a proactive person that just does things then there is no need to set goals because you will already be achieving. 

Within his talk he spoke about how art is considered a luxury, and not a STEM subject. He asks the question whether art does more and how can they flourish. Telling us to rethink how we talk about culture as art is interpreted in different ways and how no one knows what we are exactly doing with art. "Art is everything you don't have to do", I found this a really interesting interpretation because it is a very true statement, we don't have to do these things as it goes beyond human need. He backed up his point by saying that we make eating into something more and clothes, past basic need, we stylise and embellish. Even movement has been elaborated through dance. Communication through advertising, poems, and songs, everything has become highly stylised. The reason for this is because we care about style a lot, nobody dresses randomly, and this was all part of Eno's broad definition of art. I also noticed this is very relevant within the are of graphic design, technically we don't need all of these typefaces and fonts, yet we have them anyway to stylise and embellish.

Eno posed the question why is art important, because everyone is doing it. He explained that imagination is very strong in humans, that is what makes us different from other animals. He gave an example about how two ladies could easily talk about something controversial happening in a soap because it is not connected to their real lives.  Art can give us feelings about things that are not dangerous, if we see a shocking painting in a gallery, you can just leave, art stimulates different worlds. I found this a really interesting point and it really helps to show the importance of art, it has allowed us to develop and be more diverse, pushing boundaries. This is something that I hope people being negative who see no reason for the arts understand now the place it has in the world. This lecture has also made me feel a lot more positively to what I am doing because there is a lot of negative stigma art and design is not academic.