What Art is Doing
What art is doing, at this moment, is providing the only space large enough and flexible enough to contain the emotional contradictions of the present.
This is the sixth in a chain of book reviews exploring intelligence, coordination, and meaning under thermodynamic constraints. The previous five — on common knowledge, the mattering instinct, maintenance, social systems, and legal reasoning — built a framework in which life minimizes free energy, consciousness coordinates through common knowledge, and societies manage conflict through incompletely theorized agreements. This review asks what role art plays in that framework.
Brian Eno and Bette A.'s What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory fits in the palm of your hand. At just over 100 pages, playfully illustrated, typeset in fonts that change size and color and sometimes fade to nothing, it could be mistaken for the kind of book you buy at a museum shop, read on the train home, and forget. Its sentences are short. Its arguments are aphoristic. Its drawings are simple, and playful.
Beneath its whimsy runs a radical theory of art, more ambitious than Eno seems to have attempted before. For context, Eno is the man who helped invent ambient music, produced records for David Bowie and U2 and Talking Heads, and coined the word scenius. Bette A. is Bette Adriaanse, a Dutch artist, novelist, and art school teacher. Their theory, stated plainly, is that art is how human beings explore and rehearse for lives they have not yet lived. Every culture that has ever existed produced art, not (or not only) because art is decorative or prestigious or entertaining, but because art is a simulator — a safe place to experiment with feelings, identities, and social arrangements that would otherwise be too costly or dangerous.
Making Feelings Happen
Eno and Adriaanse begin with the observation: "Art is a way of making feelings happen." The rest of the book can be read as an unpacking of this observation. One that comes up almost immediately, is that "[f]eelings are powerful precisely because they aren't articulated" — because they are not common knowledge. Recall the dangers that Steven Pinker observed can attend an overshare of private knowledge, including cancellation. Some private knowledge cannot be shared directly.
The word feelings itself cries out for definition. In Coherence at 300 Kelvin, I sketched an argument — drawing on recent neuroscience — that might suggest a definition: feelings and thoughts might not be two separate systems, but different depths in the same processing cascade. The transformer architecture that biological neurons appear to implement processes information through layers, each of which coarse-grains the representation further — integrating out noise, concentrating on structure. Early layers capture coarse, global features. Later layers refine those into articulated, specific representations. Feelings may live in the early layers. They are broad, fast, low-dimensional — compressed gradient signals that register whether the system's trajectory diverges from or converges toward conditions compatible with its persistence. A feeling of dread seems to register high expected synchronization costs ahead. A feeling of excitement seems to register convergence toward preferred states. Thoughts emerge in the later layers — higher-dimensional, more articulated, transmissible — the explicit models that organisms construct for synchronizing with other observers.[1]
The transition from feelings to thoughts is not a handoff between two separate mechanisms. It is the phase transition that occurs within the forward pass itself — the same renormalization group flow from noisy detail to stable abstraction. This is why affect precedes cognition, as Zajonc demonstrated: the coarser layers finish processing first. It is why a feeling of dread can redirect the entire subsequent cascade of reasoning before you have articulated a single proposition about what you dread. The early layers set the broad focus of attention; the later layers determine the explicit response. Feelings do not merely precede thoughts. Feelings are where thoughts come from.
If this is right, then art's primary function is not the transmission of thoughts — not telling you what to think — but shaping the early layers of processing that determine what kinds of thoughts are even possible to have. A horror film does not inform you that the world is dangerous. It activates the coarse, fast, affective representations that reorient your entire cognitive regime toward danger — which is a different operation entirely from transmitting a proposition about risk. A love song does not argue that devotion is worthwhile. It tunes the early layers of your nervous system toward the state in which devotion becomes conceivable, so that the later, articulate layers have something to work with.
Art, Eno and Adriaanse suggest, evokes a simulation of another world — a bounded space in which social consequences are suspended because everybody knows that everybody knows — as we teach our children — that art is not real. A horror film lets you experience terror without danger. A love song lets you rehearse devotion without commitment. A soap opera — and the authors are quite serious about soap operas — lets entire communities practice moral reasoning about betrayal, forgiveness, loyalty, and loss. These are not idle pleasures. They are training runs.
When you weep at a film, the tears are real, the grief is real, the neurochemistry is real — but the cause is fictional. You extend your emotional repertoire into territory your actual life may never require you to visit. Or may require you to visit tomorrow. Art, on this view, does not reflect experience so much as prepare for it — prospective rather than retrospective, a forward model rather than a mirror.
I kept thinking about this distinction as I reread it, because it bears on a question that has occupied these essays from the beginning: how do systems coordinate under uncertainty? The free energy principle holds that living systems persist by minimizing surprise — by building internal models of their environment and acting to confirm those models. Karl Friston's formulation treats all adaptive behavior as a species of Bayesian inference: organisms maintain beliefs about the world and update those beliefs when evidence arrives. But where do the beliefs come from in the first place? How does a system acquire expectations about situations it has never encountered?
One answer is evolution, which encodes ancestral experience in genetic priors. Another is learning, which adjusts priors through individual encounter. Eno and Adriaanse may be offering a third: art, which lets organisms — and entire communities — rehearse experiences they have never had, extending the range of situations they can meet without catastrophic surprise. If so, art is something like Bayesian inference operating in simulation mode. It generates priors cheaply.[2]
But "cheaply" understates the mechanism. Fiction feelings — the emotions art evokes — are early-layer representations: compressed, low-dimensional, fast. They carry direction (toward safety, away from danger; toward connection, away from isolation) without carrying the full landscape that later-layer articulation would require. This is why a three-minute song can shift your orientation toward the world more efficiently than an hour of argument. The song operates on the early layers of processing — the coarse, affective representations that set the regime for everything downstream — while the argument operates on the later layers, refining content within whatever regime the early layers have already established. By the time the argument reaches you, it must pass through the filter that feelings have already set. The song is the filter.
The thermodynamic stakes, if I am reading this correctly, are real. As I argued in the synchronization tax essays, every act of coordination between systems carries an entropic cost, and the total costs of coordination decompose into three parts: transmission (moving information through existing channels), synchronization (constructing shared descriptions where none existed), and maintenance (preserving shared descriptions against entropic drift). The early, affective layers of processing tend toward the maintenance function — monitoring the organism's own state, preserving its boundary conditions. The later, articulate layers tend toward synchronization and transmission — building the shared descriptions that enable coordination with others. But the tendency is a gradient, not a partition; feelings shade into thoughts as the processing deepens, and the same representation can serve both functions at different stages of refinement. Cass Sunstein's incompletely theorized agreements showed how legal systems manage synchronization costs by coordinating on outcomes rather than reasons. But legal systems presuppose a shared affective vocabulary — a common repertoire of feelings about justice, harm, fairness, and obligation. Where does that repertoire come from?
Does it come from art?
Scenius and the Ecology of Feeling
Eno coined the word scenius — a portmanteau of "scene" and "genius" — to describe how creativity actually emerges. Not from solitary visionaries conjuring masterworks in garrets, but from ecologies of people who share tools, techniques, sensibilities, and ambitions. The genius of Impressionism did not reside in Monet alone but in the cafés, the exhibitions, the arguments, the collectors, the pigment suppliers, and the critics who together constituted a scene. Genius is individual. Scenius is systemic.
Readers of these reviews may recognize, beneath Eno's coinage, a structure that Niklas Luhmann would have found familiar. In Social Systems, Luhmann argued that society consists not of people but of communications that reproduce themselves. A social system generates its own elements from its own elements, creating and maintaining boundaries through ongoing operations rather than through any founding act. The art world, on Luhmann's account, operates through a binary code — art/not-art — that it alone adjudicates.
But Eno is saying something that Luhmann's framework, for all its elegance, tends to miss. A scenius is not merely an information-processing system. It is a feeling-processing system — a community that collectively extends its members' emotional range by producing, sharing, and arguing about hypothetical worlds. The participants in a scenius coordinate not through explicit agreements but through shared immersion in the same field of fictional representations — the same music, the same visual language, the same jokes, the same arguments about what matters. They become legible to one another not by negotiating terms but by inhabiting the same imagined spaces, sharing feelings.
Philippe Rigollet's mathematical framework for transformer attention offers a more precise description of what a scenius might be. Rigollet proves that attention dynamics drive token representations toward a unique asymptotic attractor — total consensus, all tokens collapsed to a single point. But this attractor is trivial: a system that has eliminated all difference has eliminated all information. What actually emerges, in practice, are metastable multi-cluster states — configurations where tokens synchronize rapidly within clusters while clusters merge only slowly. Within a cluster, representations cohere. Between clusters, productive divergence persists.[3]
A scenius looks very much like a metastable cluster. Its members achieve high internal synchronization — a shared emotional vocabulary, shared references, shared sensibilities — while maintaining divergence from other scenes and from the broader culture. The Impressionists understood each other. They did not need the Salon to understand them. The punk scene in 1977 London synchronized internally through shared music, shared fashion, shared contempt for prog rock — while remaining maximally divergent from the mainstream. These are not metaphors borrowed loosely from physics. They are instances of the same dynamics: within-cluster synchronization sustained by shared interaction, between-cluster divergence preserved by the maintenance of difference.
Something like common knowledge gets forged through art rather than through propositions. Steven Pinker's account of common knowledge — which I reviewed earlier in this series — shows how recursive mutual awareness structures social coordination: I know that you know that I know. But Pinker's examples are largely propositional. Common knowledge of feelings — I feel that you feel that I feel — is harder to establish through language alone. If common knowledge is best characterized as within-cluster synchronization depth rather than as infinite recursive verification, then art may be the primary mechanism by which emotional clusters form. A shared joke, a shared song, a shared film can accomplish it directly. When two strangers discover they both love the same obscure album, the delight they feel is the delight of suddenly discovering that they belong to the same cluster — that their emotional descriptions of the world were already synchronized before they met, at almost no additional synchronization cost.
Art may be the cheapest path to emotional common knowledge. I am not sure what else could be.
Control and Surrender
An especially moving passage concerns the relationship between control and surrender. Eno and Adriaanse write:
If we don't learn to make a balance between control and surrender, if we only know how to control, we end up in a world shrunken to the bits that we can still control. The raw wild world develops and leaves us behind, playing Solitaire on our phones.
Translated into the language of these essays, this is a statement about the limits of free energy minimization — though Eno did not put it that way, and something would have been lost if he had. A system that minimizes surprise by restricting its environment — by controlling everything it encounters — shrinks its world to the dimensions of its model. It becomes brittle. Friston's mathematics shows that adaptive systems must balance exploitation (acting on existing beliefs) with exploration (exposing themselves to surprise). A system that only exploits its current model will eventually be destroyed by novelty it never learned to expect.
The transformer architecture exhibits two failure modes that correspond to the extremes Eno describes. When the effective coupling is too strong — when the system tries to pay the entire synchronization tax in a single interaction — attention collapses to a hard argmax. The system freezes. This is total control: every input forced into a single interpretation, every surprise eliminated by fiat. When the system pays the synchronization tax too many times — when depth drives all relational structure to zero — every representation carries the same description, and no further information can be extracted. This is total surrender: the system has been so thoroughly synchronized that nothing distinct remains. Do you share my sense that we have an instinctive feel for these regimes?
Productive computation — productive living — sits between these extremes. Two mechanisms keep a system in this band. One is temperature regulation — astrocytes in the brain, institutions in a society — which controls how sharply or diffusely attention distributes itself across possible states. The other is the depth and quality of the early-layer representations that set the broad focus for everything downstream. When the early layers of processing are impoverished — when the affective repertoire is thin — the system has fewer starting points from which the later, articulate layers can build. It commits too quickly or explores too aimlessly, not because the temperature is wrong but because it lacks the coarse structure from which finer structure could emerge.
Art enriches both mechanisms. It is structured exploration — how a community exposes itself to surprise under controlled conditions. But it is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, how a community builds the early-layer representations that determine what kinds of exploration become possible in the first place. Eno — who spent decades building generative music systems that produce sounds he cannot predict — knows this in his bones. The composer who writes out every note seeks total control. The generative artist who designs a system and then listens to what it produces practices surrender. The art emerges in the tension between the two — in the space between the rule and the surprise, the intention and the accident, the model and the world.
There is an analogy here to what Stewart Brand, in Maintenance, called the fundamental challenge of maintaining complex systems: you cannot anticipate every failure mode, so you must build systems that degrade gracefully in the face of surprises you cannot foresee. Brand's answer was redundancy, modularity, and communities of practice. Eno's answer is art — the practice of welcoming surprise rather than merely tolerating it. Whether these are the same answer at different scales, I am not certain. But they rhyme.
What Art is Doing
The book's subtitle — An Unfinished Theory — is not false modesty. It is a structural commitment. The last two pages are blank, left for the reader's own notes. The theory is literally unfinished, and Eno and Adriaanse insist that finishing it is not their job. They have started something. It will go on to have a life they did not predict.
This gesture manifests the theory it describes. Proper art — as Joseph Campbell used the term — does not push you toward a conclusion or pull you away from one. It brings you to stillness. You do not want to possess it. You do not want to flee from it. You stand before it in equipoise.
Campbell distinguished "proper" from "improper" art on precisely these grounds. Improper art is kinetic — it moves you. Art that moves you toward its object is pornographic. Art that moves you away is didactic. All propaganda is didactic art. All advertising is pornographic art. Proper art is metastable — it suspends you between desire and loathing, between hope and despair, between the mattering instinct's demand for significance and entropy's indifference to that demand. It lets you stand at the center and see.
If feelings are the early layers of a processing cascade that shades continuously into thought, then proper art holds the cascade at the critical point of its own phase transition — the boundary between the ordered phase (where attention commits, where conviction crystallizes, where the later layers lock into a specific articulation) and the disordered phase (where attention diffuses, where certainty dissolves, where the later layers cannot settle). Improper art pushes you past the transition in one direction or the other: pornographic art excites the early layers into a disordered state of desire, so the later layers organize around acquisition; didactic art freezes the early layers into an ordered state of conviction, so the later layers produce only confirmations. Proper art keeps you at the boundary, where the early layers are active enough to matter but uncommitted enough to leave the later layers free — where the system is most adaptive, most sensitive, most alive to information from all directions.[4]
Eno's book, I should admit, is improper art in Campbell's sense — it is a manifesto, a provocation, a call to action. It wants to move you. It moved me. The title change I have given this review — from What Art Does to What Art is Doing — marks the difference between the theory the book describes and the reality that the book manifests. The book describes how art functions as a simulator. But the deeper truth, which the book manifests without quite saying so, is that art is functioning right now as the primary medium through which human beings — and perhaps, soon, nonhuman systems — coordinate their emotional responses to a world changing faster than any single intelligence can track.
What art is doing, at this moment, is providing the only space large enough and flexible enough to contain the emotional contradictions of the present. We are building systems more intelligent than we are, and we do not know whether they experience anything. We are destroying ecological systems faster than we can catalogue them. We are coordinating across unprecedented scales through institutions designed for smaller, slower worlds. The propositions we might coordinate on are contested. The reasons we might share are incommensurable. But the feelings — the terror and wonder and grief and exhilaration of being alive right now — these can be shared, through art, at a cost low enough to bear.
At least we can hope they can.
Exhilarated Despair
Francis Bacon — the painter, not the philosopher — spent his career making art about the impossibility of making art about anything that matters. His screaming popes, his smeared lovers, his slabs of meat impaled on armatures borrowed from the Crucifixion — all depict a world drained of transcendence, a world in which bodies contort and mouths gape open and no one answers. He described his subjects as gasping for breath in the void. He believed art was meaningless. He destroyed most of what he made.
And yet his paintings are among the most stimulating visual experiences the twentieth century produced. They hit the nervous system before the intellect can intercept them. They do not explain suffering. They do not redeem it. They make you feel, in the instant of looking, that the act of looking — of attending — is itself worth the price of consciousness.
In explaining his creativity, Bacon has described a duality, at the same time energetic and empty of hope: "exhilarated despair." A feeling of confronting meaninglessness and finding, in the confrontation itself, a vitality that meaninglessness cannot account for. Bacon could not explain why his paintings worked. Perhaps they worked because they placed the viewer precisely where Campbell said proper art should: at a still point between desire and loathing, between the hunger for meaning and the evidence against it, between the mattering instinct's demand that existence justify itself and entropy's serene refusal to comply.
This may not be a quirk of Bacon's technique. It may be the structure of the processing cascade itself, coarser layers finishing first, and whatever state they establish constraining what the finer layers can produce. By the time you have a thought about a Bacon painting, the feeling has already shaped the entire cascade through which that thought formed.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose Mattering Instinct I reviewed earlier in this series, argues that the drive to matter is a fundamental feature of human psychology — as real as hunger, as demanding as fear. A culture that ignores it produces pathologies of despair. But a culture that satisfies it too easily — that offers cheap significance, pre-fabricated meaning, ideological certainty — produces pathologies of a different kind: rigidity, fanaticism, the lethal confidence of believing your mattering project is the only one that counts.
The mattering instinct, like all free-energy-minimizing processes, may operate best at the boundary between order and surprise. Too much order and the system freezes. Too much surprise and it dissolves. Art — proper art — holds us at that boundary. It does not tell us that we matter. It does not tell us that we don't. It places us in a space where the question stays open, where the tension between significance and entropy is palpable but unresolved, where we can feel both the weight of the question and the strange lightness that comes from asking it honestly.
Eno and Adriaanse's unfinished book points manifests this truth. Their book is warm where Bacon is cold, playful where Bacon is savage, hopeful where Bacon is bleak. But both seem in this specific sense to be doing something similar — creating hypothetical worlds in which a person can rehearse a relationship with uncertainty, can practice, in the safety of art, the equipoise demanded by life in a world of irreducible uncertainty.
The blank pages at the end of the book are not an invitation to finish the theory. They are the sharp point of the theory. The unfinished part is the part that matters — the part where you sit with what you have felt and decide, without anyone telling you, what it means.
Francis Bacon would have left the pages blank too. But he would have left a bloody fingerprint first.
The gradient from feelings to thoughts maps loosely onto the three-part decomposition of coordination costs I described in Maintaining Divergence. The early, coarse layers tend toward maintenance — monitoring the organism's own state, preserving its boundary conditions. The later, articulate layers tend toward synchronization and transmission — building shared descriptions for coordination with others. But the mapping is a tendency, not a partition; the same representation can serve both functions at different depths. Recent neuroscience supports the continuum picture. Kozachkov, Kastanenka, and Krotov constructed the transformer self-attention mechanism from biological neurons and astrocytes. A trio of 2025 Science papers then showed that astrocytes regulate the effective temperature of neural networks — the coupling parameter that controls how broadly or narrowly the brain distributes its attention — without engaging in rapid neural signaling. Astrocytes regulate the regime of the processing cascade, which complements the cascade's own progression from coarse to fine. Temperature regulation and layer depth are two aspects of the same system: astrocytes control how sharply attention concentrates at each layer, while the layer depth determines what scale of structure that attention resolves. ↩︎
Readers familiar with Yuval Noah Harari's thesis in Sapiens may recognize this as similar to his view that imagined realities enabled coordination among strangers. But as Steven Pinker noted in When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows, Harari leaves a gap: how are those imagined realities shared? Pinker fills it with the mechanism of common knowledge, but leaves many details unspecified. Eno and Adriaanse's theory of art is more complete than Harari's in a technical sense: art is a technology for generating common knowledge through shared experiences that may be entirely inarticulate — operating on the early, affective layers of processing rather than the later, propositional layers, which is precisely why art can forge the kind of emotional common knowledge that propositions alone cannot. ↩︎
Rigollet calls these chimera states — configurations in which coexisting synchronized and desynchronized populations persist. The term comes from the Kuramoto model of coupled oscillators, whose origins Yoshiki Kuramoto recently traced in a retrospective on half a century of synchronization theory. The connection to art is that a healthy culture, like a healthy brain, may need to maintain chimera structure: some domains tightly synchronized (shared law, shared language, shared currency), others productively desynchronized (competing artistic visions, divergent emotional vocabularies, unresolved aesthetic arguments). A culture that synchronizes everything has eliminated the diversity it needs to adapt. A culture that synchronizes nothing cannot coordinate at all. ↩︎
The critical brain hypothesis — that neural circuits self-organize near a critical point between ordered and disordered phases — has been studied using renormalization group methods. If the brain operates near criticality for optimal information processing, then proper art, by holding the viewer at the critical point, may be doing something more precise than "expanding consciousness." It may be returning the nervous system to its most computationally powerful state — the state where sensitivity to incoming information is maximized, where the system can detect the faintest signals in the noisiest environments. The affect-led decision-making literature supports this indirectly: the early, coarse layers of processing finish before the later, articulate layers because they have less structure to resolve. Art that activates these early layers before delivering propositional content exploits the temporal structure of the cascade to set the conditions under which content will be received — shaping the regime of cognition rather than operating within it. ↩︎