Brian Eno

speaker

1,303 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 21 Jul

Brian Eno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

Yes.

I think the answer to that is that, of course, when we look at any piece of art, we're not looking just at that piece of art.

We're looking at this piece of art in terms of our own personal history.

So it's like you're hearing the latest sentence in a conversation you've been having for your whole life.

I wrote this little story once about somebody finding, in some post-apocalyptic time, finding an art museum.

And the whole place is wrecked, but there's lots of pictures still around.

And they find one picture that obviously hasn't been finished, which is just a white canvas, which of course, in fact, is Malevich's White on White.

So it has no meaning to that person who doesn't share its history.

Part of the value of any piece of work and the power of it is how it sits in the cultural conversation in general and in your cultural conversation in particular.

So a little difference that is very significant to you may be meaningless to somebody else.

For instance, I've always had a rather blind spot for Shakespeare.

No English person is ever supposed to admit that, but Shakespeare's never thrilled me.

I find it hard to read and quite unrewarding.

So, when a critic, a writer, picks out a Shakespeare sentence and talks about its significance, they do that because they know the rest of the Shakespeare canon and they know where it sits in there and what value it therefore has.

It doesn't mean anything to me because I don't know any of those things and I don't care about them in that case either.

Well, one of the problems that fine art faces is the problem of its own irrelevance to most people's lives.

Nobody buys a £2 million or a £20 million painting just because they like it.

They buy it because there's a good chance they'll be able to sell it again

at a profit, or it secures them a sort of social status that is not easily obtainable otherwise.

So you have to make it seem very important.

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