Brian Eno Quotes
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The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.
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There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
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I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
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Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.
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Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.
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I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.
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You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.
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Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.
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I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.
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I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
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I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn't what they wanted. So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people "Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work." And of course I'm very pleased if people like all of them, but I don't want them to feel deceived at any point.
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If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.
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I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.
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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.
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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.
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I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'
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I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
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I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.
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Ideas worth questioning: 'Being an artist is a job for life.'
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Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
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I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.
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Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.
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Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
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One often makes music to supplement one's world.