At a mere 4.5 by 6.5 inches, only 122 pages long, with a cover that’s bright white and soothing flamingo pink, Brian Eno and Bette A.’s What Art Does beckons with an easy-going, “See? Manageable.” That’s even with its subtitle An Unfinished Theory dragging along like tin cans attached to a car, startling everyone. That said, a quick peek inside is even more welcoming. Bette A.’s deceptively naive, you-could-almost-draw-them-yourself, just beyond line drawings are full of childlike whimsy. The typography is also playful, changing size, color, font, and even fading away. Given the ultra-creative natures of its authors — Eno is a British polymath musician, producer, artist, activist, and A. is a Dutch artist, novelist, and art school teacher — of course this book about art is art itself.
But then what is art? That’s where the aphoristic writing steps in, each sentence a barbed argument posed as an indubitable statement. You find yourself bobbing your head in agreement page after page. Take this run of claims, “We all make art all the time, but we don’t really call it that;” art is “the name for a kind of engagement we have with something;” and, “the art engagement begins where functional engagement ends.”
That isn’t to say the book isn’t chockful of examples to make its case. Take its very early two-page spread that offers an expanded universe of what art can be, at least 450 actions, including these favorites — twerking, cocktails, gravestones, wisecracks, and DJing. The book’s brevity shouldn’t be considered a limit on its desire to see our options as unbounded. After all, that’s what art is meant to do, according to the authors, let us imagine other worlds. They write, “As artists we don’t finish it: we start it. It goes on to have a life without us, a life we didn’t predict.”
Of course that leaves me, at this tenuous time, to reply, “Hey, could that life have less Trump in it, please?” The book never mentions him or politics overtly, but at the same time anyone willing to accept the gospel according to Eno and A. would have to live a more vivid life than that of a cretin who thinks culture is gilding his penthouse’s toilet bowl. Art, by allowing you to have “fiction feelings,” from horror at a haunted house to the glory of a love story, “enriches your feelings repertoire.” And who doesn’t need that? Creativity gets to be its own reward, for they write, “Play is how children learn; art is how adults play.”
That power of play allows us to develop our imagination muscle. Since, they argue, “civilization is shared imagination,” it would behoove us to pump up our imaginations as much as we can short of steroid abuse. But they also make clear what brilliant computers we all are, simply by considering what it takes for us to answer the question, “What is it I really like?” We never answer that question as single agents; they recognize all the webs of culture, country, family, personal history, economics that weigh on us. But we process all that lightning fast. For instance, when deciding upon what earring we want to wear, you might run through 67 questions in seconds — they’re all there on page 46. And that happens lickety-split. Take that, AI.
Still, Eno and A. keep us focused on the cultural conversation, which they assert we must surrender to. They write: “If we don’t learn to make a balance between control and surrender, if we only know how to control, we end up in a world shrunken to the bits that we can still control. The raw wild world develops and leaves us behind, playing Solitaire on our phones.”
So in its modest way, this manifesto kills fascists. Plus it offers a striking two-page bibliography suggesting you read the likes of Cory Doctorow, bell hooks, David Graeber, Audre Lorde, Yanis Varoufakis and more revolutionary thinkers.
Then the book’s last two pages are for your own notes — after all, the theory is unfinished and up to you.
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.
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