Art & Creativity Quote by Brian Eno

Eno’s line quietly flips the usual pecking order: the musician noticing that painters once wanted to be musicians. It lands because it exposes an insecurity that still haunts culture-making - the suspicion that some arts are “higher” because they seem less contaminated by literal meaning. Around the turn of the 20th century, painting is wrestling with photography, industrial modernity, and the exhaustion of straightforward representation. If a camera can copy the world faster and cheaper, the painter has to justify paint as more than depiction. “Like music” becomes the escape hatch: music is abstract, time-based, and emotionally persuasive without having to “say” anything concrete. It feels pure.

Eno’s intent isn’t to dunk on painting; it’s to spotlight a historical moment when artists chased a model of experience rather than a model of objects. Think of Kandinsky’s spiritual abstraction, Whistler’s “Nocturnes,” later the synesthetic dreams of Scriabin and the whole Bauhaus-era urge to unify the senses. Music is framed as “noblest” because it’s harder to pin down and therefore easier to mythologize - a prestige rooted in ambiguity.

The subtext is also very Eno: a defense of art that behaves like an environment. His own work treats music less as narrative and more as atmosphere, texture, and system. By pointing out that painters coveted music’s status, he’s hinting that the real modern ambition was to make art you inhabit, not art that merely illustrates.