We take vacations in other people's nightmares. You?

Why We Play

 By Brian Eno

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The experimental musician, Brian Eno,  began his talk by questioning the dominant economic values of our times.

 

"It's possible to graduate from a school or university with fantastic results and not know a fucking thing about anything," he observed, to loud applause.

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"If you watch children, they play all the time -- but what are they doing when they're playing? They're imagining. They're feeling out things. They're trying to understand what other people feel about things. So children learn by playing - adults play through art."

 

Eno spoke of culture as the "lubricant" of society's evolution, while warning that in England and other countries it is being regarded as "less and less important."

 

"Nobody really knows what the arts are for," he said. The arts, he said, are treated as a sort of "luxury add-on" Eno told the crowd. "Once you deal with the difficult problems, like earning a living and getting planes to fly and trains to run on time, then you can have a bit of art, sort of like the ice cream at the end of the meal."

 

"What I want to convince you of is that - that isn't the way it works at all," he said. "That the only way that we can continue to cooperate and work together as a human society, and as the community that we are, is with lots and lots and lots of culture and art.

 

"I want to convince you that it is the most important thing you can do."