{"id":5723,"date":"2014-06-30T14:37:36","date_gmt":"2014-06-30T21:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=5723"},"modified":"2014-07-07T14:42:36","modified_gmt":"2014-07-07T21:42:36","slug":"scenius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2014\/06\/30\/scenius\/","title":{"rendered":"Scenius"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"header\" style=\"color: #000000;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/arts\/critics\/musical\/2014\/07\/07\/140707crmu_music_frerejones\" target=\"_blank\"><em>from The New Yorker<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h1 id=\"articlehed\" class=\"header\" style=\"color: #000000;\">AMBIENT GENIUS<\/h1>\n<h2 id=\"articleintro\" style=\"font-weight: 400; color: #000000;\">The working life of Brian Eno.<\/h2>\n<h4 id=\"articleauthor\" style=\"font-weight: 400; color: #000000; margin-bottom: 8px;\"><span class=\"c cs\">BY\u00a0<a style=\"color: #000000;\" href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/bios\/sasha_frere-jones\/search?contributorName=sasha%20frere%20jones\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"author\">SASHA FRERE-JONES<\/a><\/span><\/h4>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Rm36ZxJboUI\" width=\"480\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"descender\" style=\"color: #000000;\">In January, 1975, the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt released a set of flash cards they called \u201cOblique Strategies.\u201d Friends since meeting at art school, in the late sixties, they had long shared guidelines that could pry apart an intellectual logjam, providing options when they couldn\u2019t figure out how to move forward. The first edition consisted of a hundred and fifteen cards. They were black on one side with an aphorism or an instruction printed on the reverse. Eno\u2019s first rule was \u201cHonour thy error as a hidden intention.\u201d Others included \u201cUse non-musicians\u201d and \u201cTape your mouth.\u201d In \u201cBrian Eno: Visual Music,\u201d a monograph of his musical projects and visual art, Eno, who still uses the rules, says, \u201c\u00a0\u2018Oblique Strategies\u2019 evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation\u2014particularly in studios\u2014tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Eno is widely known for coining the term \u201cambient music,\u201d and he produced a clutch of critically revered albums in the nineteen-seventies and eighties\u2014by the Talking Heads, David Bowie, and U2, among others\u2014but if I had to choose his greatest contribution to popular music it would be the idea that musicians do their best work when they have no idea what they\u2019re doing. As he told\u00a0<i>Keyboard<\/i>, in 1981, \u201cAny constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on\u2014including your own incompetence.\u201d The genius of Eno is in removing the idea of genius. His work is rooted in the power of collaboration within systems: instructions, rules, and self-imposed limits. His methods are a rebuke to the assumption that a project can be powered by one person\u2019s intent, or that intent is even worth worrying about. To this end, Eno has come up with words like \u201cscenius,\u201d which describes the power generated by a group of artists who gather in one place at one time. (\u201cGenius is individual, scenius is communal,\u201d Eno told the\u00a0<i>Guardian<\/i>, in 2010.) It suggests that the quality of works produced in a certain time and place is more indebted to the friction between the people on hand than to the work of any single artist.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">[ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/arts\/critics\/musical\/2014\/07\/07\/140707crmu_music_frerejones\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The New Yorker AMBIENT GENIUS The working life of Brian Eno. BY\u00a0SASHA FRERE-JONES In January, 1975, the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt released a set of flash cards they called \u201cOblique Strategies.\u201d Friends since meeting at art school, in the late sixties, they had long shared guidelines that could pry apart [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5723\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}