Brian Eno on culture: "Culture is everything we don’t have to do. Eating is necessary, but cuisine is culture. Clothes must be worn, but couture is culture. Haircuts and Shakespeare and early Saxon burial poetry all pose some kind of unnecessary order, he said, that we accept because it stimulates our most distinctive faculty. Imagination is the only thing we’re really good at. What we’re doing [when we’re engaging with cultural objects] is exercising that part of our mind that makes it possible to imagine things being ordered differently, and most importantly, to imagine what’s in other people’s minds. . . . If something is possible in art, it’s thinkable in life."
