Creative conundrum Brian Eno has some interesting things to say about art and culture and their role in modern life. In this short interview/overview for The Globe and Mail, he defines things this way:
”Culture is everything we don’t have to do,” he said. Eating is necessary, but cuisine is culture. Clothes must be worn, but couture is culture. Haircuts and Shakespeare and early Saxon burial poetry all pose some kind of unnecessary order, he said, that we accept because it stimulates our most distinctive faculty.
”Imagination is the only thing we’re really good at,” he said. ”What we’re doing [when we’re engaging with cultural objects] is exercising that part of our mind that makes it possible to imagine things being ordered differently, and most importantly, to imagine what’s in other people’s minds….”
It recalls a quote by C.S. Lewis, with similar tension between what’s necessary and what’s important:
”Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art….It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
Jim Wilde says
Hi,
Thank you for the quote…”Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art….It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” Yeah, giving value is sharing with others those things that define our existence.