via Austin Kleon newsletter . . . . . 

"So, there is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it’s still quite a long way off. Basically, you’re still sitting there using just the muscles of your hand, really. Of one hand, actually. It’s another example of the transfer of literacy to making music because the assumption is that everything important is happening in your head; the muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn’t how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They’re using their whole body to make music, in fact. Whereas it’s quite clear that if the interface between you and a computer is a mouse, then everything of interest that happens must be happening in your head. It’s a big step backwards, I think."

— Eno

Brian Eno: “The artist is now a curator.” » From Kevin Kelly’s fantastic 1995 Wired interview with Brian Eno (17 years ago!): An artist is now a curator. 

An artist is now much more seen as a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention, and says, What I am going to do is draw your attention to this sequence of things. If you read art history up until 25 or 30 years ago, you’d find there was this supposition of succession: from Verrocchio, through Giotto, Primaticcio, Titian, and so on, as if a crown passes down through the generations. But in the 20th century, instead of that straight kingly line, there’s suddenly a broad field of things that get called art, including vernacular things, things from other cultures, things using new technologies like photo and film. It’s difficult to make any simple linear connection through them. Now, the response of early modern art history was to say, Oh, OK. All we do is broaden the line to include more of the things we now find ourselves regarding as art. So there’s still a line, but it’s much broader. But what postmodernist thinking is suggesting is that there isn’t one line, there’s just a field, a field through which different people negotiate differently. Thus there is no longer such a thing as “art history” but there are multiple “art stories.” Your story might involve foot-binding, Indonesian medicine rituals, and late Haydn string quartets, something like that. You have made what seems to you a meaningful pattern in this field of possibilities. You’ve drawn your own line. This is why the curator, the editor, the compiler, and the anthologist have become such big figures. They are all people whose job it is to digest things, and to connect them together… To create meanings - or perhaps “new readings,” which is what curators try to do - is to create. Period. Making something new does not necessarily involve bringing something physical into existence - it can be something mental such as a metaphor or a theory. More and more curatorship becomes inseparable from the so-called art part. Since there’s no longer a golden line through the fine arts, you are acting curatorially all the time by just making a choice to be in one particular place in the field rather than another. 

again from Austin Kleon Newsletter . . . . 

Unadventure as creation  »

NYT: Pushing Back the Limits of Speech and Music

Eno on unadventure:

“In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person,” Mr. Eno said. 
“I take the same walk every day and I eat in the same restaurants, 
and often eat exactly the same things in the same restaurants. 
I don’t adventure much except when I’m in the studio, and then I only want to adventure.
 I cannot bear doing something again, or thinking that I’m doing something again.”


As Jacobs once said, “Differentiation emerg[es] from generality. 
Differentiations become generalities from which further differentiations occur.” 
My summer has been only about variation — in location, in people, 
in process — but slowed down creation here. It’s good to be home.


It’s like Flaubert said, 
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”


Routine is key.

Brian Eno on Television (1991)

Stop being so right Brian Eno. STOP. Go, like, make a 30-minute song with five soft piano notes.

Replace “TV"with “art,” period.

And yes, Brian Eno was right about pretty much everything.

again from Austin Kleon

"Lyrics are really the last very hard problem in music. 
Software and hardware have changed music dramatically in the last thirty or forty years.
 It’s very, very easy to make pretty good music.
 I could take anyone in this room, and within two hours, 
we could make a pretty good music. 
(Pretty good isn’t very interesting, but pretty good is possible.) 
But writing songs is just about in the same place it was in the days of Chaucer."

— Eno, 

interviewed 

by 

Alan Moore