"What is cultural value and how does that come about? Nearly all of the history of art history is about trying to identify the source of value in cultural objects. Color theories, and dimension theories, golden means, all those sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically more beautiful and meaningful than others. New cultural thinking isn't like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It's the act of conferring that makes things valuable. Now this is very important, because so many, in fact all fundamentalist ideas rest on the assumption that some things have intrinsic value and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists work from another assumption: no, it's us. It's us who make those meanings."
BRIAN PETER GEORGE ST. JEAN LE BAPTISTE DE LA SALLE ENO, sometimes simply Eno, is an electronic musician who studied art prior to moving to London in 1969 to join Roxy records where he began making and producing records. He then went on to produce a number of highly eclectic and increasingly ambient electronic and acoustic albums. In the late 1970s he picked up his visual art activities again and began making installations with light, video, slides, and sound.
Eno is widely cited as coining the term "ambient music" in his Ambient series (Music for Airports, The Plateaux of Mirror, Day of Radiance and On Land). He collaborated with David Byrne, formerly of Talking Heads, on "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" which was one of the first albums not in the rap or hip hop genres to extensively feature sampling. Eno collaborated with David Bowie as a writer and musician on Bowie's influential "Berlin trilogy" of albums, Low, Heroes and Lodger, on Bowie's later album 1. Outside, and on the song "I'm Afraid of Americans".
Eno has also collaborated with David Bowie, John Cale, Laurie Anderson. Robert Fripp of King Crimson, Robert Wyatt on his Shleep CD, with Jon Hassell and with the German duo Cluster. He has acted as a producer for a number of bands, including U2, Talking Heads. Devo, and James. He won the best producer award at the 1994 and 1996 BRIT awards. He executive produced the "Help" benefit album, and performed with Pavarotti, Bono and The Edge at 1995's Modena Festival to benefit the War Child charitable organization.
He is an innovator across many fields of music and recently he has collaborated on the development of the Koan algorithmic music generator. He has also been involved in the field of visual arts. The band A Certain Ratio took their name from the lyrics of Eno's song "The True Wheel" (on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)). In 1996 Brian Eno, and others, started the Long Now Foundation to educate the public into thinking about the very long term future of society. Brian Eno is also a columnist for the British newspaper, The Observer.
Over the past 10 years he has had 10 group shows and 33 individual shows of his audio/video installations in cities throughout the world. He is a member of the The Long Now Foundation board of directors, and the author of A Year With Swollen Appendices.
