This years annual John Peel Lecture featured notable English musician, record producer and visual artist Brian Eno. In the lecture, Eno sought to demonstrate the complex nature of 'culture' - how both the individuals and institutions involved are crucially connected, and how they combine to create 'culture' as we know it.
He raised some very interesting questions about art and whether art is simply a luxury, or does it do something for us beyond that? He defined 'art' very broadly as 'everything we don't have to do'. And in many ways he is right - we don't have to create art, and we don't have to express complex emotions, but we do simply because we can. That comes in a similar vein to Eno's suggestion that we don't have to learn how to dance - movement is essential to our livelihoods, but we don't have to learn how to waltz. We do simply because we are able. From this he concluded that 'art' and by extension 'culture' are the embellishments we add to our lives.
But art does serve a purpose beyond that. Art allows us to see things, realise things, talk about things that would otherwise be considered too ‘sensitive’ in our actual lives. Things such as sexuality, gender, racism or death. In the American aesthetician Morse Peckham's book entitled 'Man’s Rage For Chaos: Biology, Behaviour and the Arts' he states that "art is the exposure to the tensions and problems of a false world in order that man may endure the tensions and problems of the real world." Eno then adds that it is also the exposure to the joys and freedoms of a false world that allow us to recognise those and locate them in the real world. He says that art provides us with a safe environment to experience feelings that we may or may not have felt before - 'it gives us the chance to have feelings about things that are not dangerous'. And this is possible because when you walk into a gallery and see an image, a painting, a sculpture that deals with extreme emotions, there is always the option to switch it off and walk away.
This lecture was an extremely interesting listen because to be able to define 'art' and 'culture' in such simple terms was fascinating to hear. Begin able to define my practice and what I'm doing within my work is something I have tried to do many time before but realising that anything in life that we can embellish can also be considered 'art' was eye-opening.