Q: What is the nature of the artistic drive?

"[A] question I've always been really interested in is ... 'is there a way of understanding why humans continuously and constantly and without exception engage in cultural activity? We don't know of human groups that don't produce something that we would call art. It seems to be something that we are biologically inclined to do. If we are, then what is the nature of that drive? What is it doing for us? When people say, well surely this has been written about, what I say is, actually it hasn't, really. The number of books on this subject is vanishingly small. They occupy a shelf about 18" long. What has been done is a huge sort of taxonomy of cultural artifacts; people sort of listing things and saying that looks a bit like that, and these seem to belong together, and so on and so on. But this is a little bit like natural history before Darwin came along. ...

"[P]art of my life of course is being an artist, but the other part, and just as interesting to me, is wondering what it is I'm doing, or what everybody else is doing — asking what it's for.
    "If you asked 20 scientists what they thought they were doing, or what they thought the point of science was, I would think that most of them would come up with an answer something like, we want to understand the world, we want to see how the world works. If you asked 20 artists the same question — what are you doing it for, what does art do for us — I guarantee you'll get about 15 different answers, and the other five will tell you to mind your own business. There is no consensus whatsoever about what art is there for although some people will say, well, it's to make life more beautiful.
    "Here I am, an artist — who reads mostly science books — like most other artists. I know very few artists who read books about art. Why, I ask myself, is there not a conversation of that quality in the arts? Many artists normally are talking about science, they're not talking about art — there is not a developed language, for having a conversation about the arts....
    "[P]eople had a very poor understanding of the arts, and the reason they could happily waffle on about it was because their waffle was unchallengeable. There's such a poor conversation about it that you can say whatever crap you want to, and nobody's going to call you on it. The other thing is that everybody recognises the power of science. We recognise the power of cloning technologies, of nuclear weapons and so on. Everybody knows that science is powerful and could be dangerous, therefore there's a whole lot of criticism on that basis. What people don't realise is that culture is powerful and could be dangerous too. As long as culture is talked about as though it's a kind of nice little add-on to make things look a bit better in this sort of brutal life we all lead, as long as it's just seen as the icing on the cake, then people won't realise that it's the medium in which we're immersed, and which is forming us, which is making us what we are and what we think.”

~ Brian Eno from his recent "conversation" with Stewart Brand on 'A Big Theory Of Culture'