Brian Eno on Pornography

Brian Eno On Pornography

From a 1974 profile of Brian Eno, found via Bondage Blog:

His voice trails off as he spies a copy of Search magazine. He leafs through it with obvious pleasure, but the gleam in his eyes softens, and sadly he shakes his head, "It's a burning shame that most people want to keep pornography under cover when it's such a highly developed art form -- which is one of the reasons that I started collecting pornographic playing cards I've got about 50 packs which feature on all my record covers for the astute observer.

"There's something about pornography which has a similarity to rock music. A pornographic photographer aims his camera absolutely directly, at the centre of sexual attention. He's not interested in the environment of the room.

"I hate the sort of photography in Penthouse and Playboy which is such a compromise between something to give you a hard-on and something which pretends to be artistic. The straight pornographers aim right there where it's at.

"Which is analogous to so many other situations where somebody thinks one thing is important, so they focus completely on that and don't realize they're unconsciously organizing everything else around it as well. I have such beautiful pornography - I'll show you my collection sometime.

The last guy invited me up to see his etchings.

"One theory is that black-and-white photography is always more sexy than colour photography. The reason for this is provided by Marshall McLuhan, who points out that if a thing is 'high definition,' which colour photography is, it provides more information and doesn't require participation as much as if it is 'low definition'." I.e. a horror play on the radio is always very, very frightening because the imagery is always your own. If youUre choosing your own imagery, you'll always choose the most frightening, or in the case of pornography, the most sexual.

"The idea of things being low definition has always interested me a lot - of being unspecific - another thing which is a key-point of my lyrics. They must be 'low definition' so that they don't say anything at all direct. I think the masters of that were Lou