Monday 30 November 2009

The rise of the cherry-pickers

"We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

"I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life."

- Brian Eno (read the rest here)

1 comment:

  1. I was gonna say "what a moany old man"
    but he deftly made up for these short-comings in the second paragraph.

    On the article proper, I agree with the points he makes - except
    the catorizing and fractionizing of styles.
    "Black Ambient" WTF?

    ReplyDelete