Reprint

This is the provocative opening speech by Brian Eno at the Turner Prize in 1995. - Eno throws the gauntlet to the arts world and dares them to explain the value of our projects in as broad and accessible way as the sciences have theirs. Thanks to my wife for pointing it out to me, and thanks to Phaidon and Alan Fletcher for publishing it in The Art of Looking Sideways.

The Turner Prize is justly celebrated for raising all sorts of questions in the public mind about art and its place in our lives. Unfortunately, however, the intellectual climate surrounding the fine arts is so vaporous and self-satisfied that few of these questions are ever actually asked, let alone answered.

Why is it that all of us here - presumably members of the arts community - probably know more about the currents of thought in contemporary science than those in contemporary art? Why have the sciences yielded great explainers like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould, while the arts routinely produce some of the loosest thinking and worst writing in history? Why has the art world been unable to articulate any kind of useful paradigm for what it's doing now? I'm not saying that artists should have to 'explain' their work, or that writers expain it for them, but that there could and should be a comprehensive public discussion about what art does for us, what is being learned from it, what it might enable us to do or think or feel that we couldn't before. Most of the public criticism of the arts is really an attempt to ask exactly such questions, and, instead of just priding ourselves on creating controversy by raising them, trying to answer a few might not be such a bad idea. The sciences rose to this challange, and the book sales those authors enjoy indicate a surprising public appetite for complex issues, the result of which has been a broadening social dialogue about the power and beauty and limits of science. There's been almost no equivalent in the arts. The making of new culture is, given our performance in the fine and popular arts, just about our only growth industry aside from heritage cream teas and land-mines, but the lack of a clear connection between all that creative activity and the intellectual life of the society leaves the whole project poorly understood, poorly supported, and poorly exploited.

If we're going to expect people to help fund the arts, whether through taxation or lotteries, then surely we owe them an attempt at an explanation of what value we think the arts might be to them.

The folks at RAND have been making a stab at it in a very methodical way, and backed by their research, we may be able to take on the responsibility of becoming our own spokespeople.