What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory

Eno (A Year with Swollen Appendices) gets to the heart of art’s purpose in this playful and concise illustrated guide. Drawing on his career as a songwriter, composer, and producer, he explores art’s key functions—engendering emotions; sparking empathy; and expanding worldviews. Even art that is ostensibly purely escapist illuminates a “better” reality that provides a “richer understanding” of what this one might be missing, Eno writes. In the face of such pressing crises as climate change and intolerance, art is less an escape hatch than a means to create the blueprints for a better world. For instance, Eno points out that musicians in the 1960s helped broaden the acceptability of different forms of gender expression with music in which men “embrace[d] feelings previously regarded as ‘unmasculine’ and... women embrace[d] feelings previously regarded as ‘unfeminine.’ ” Eno also makes trenchant points about how art is a fundamentally empathetic practice that celebrates differences while offering a “reservoir of shared experiences” people can use to exchange “complex feelings and ideas with each other.” The result is an inventive and energetic defense of art as far more than the navel-gazing “pretty luxury” it’s often portrayed to be. Illus. (Mar.)