While browsing my RSS feeds, I ran across Brian Eno’s latest artistic endeavours. After going to the official 77 Million Paintings site, I was instantly transported back to my days at Atlanta College of Art (recently merged into Savannah College of Art). Believe it or not, while attending a fine arts school for a degree in electronic arts, what I think I really got was an education in sales and marketing.

During my time there I learned that it’s not about what the art actually is, but it’s ALL about the projection of the creative process. If you can sound like you’ve considered the work on a higher level of thought process and can speak with a tone of authority, then you have a good chance of getting into the art community and having people pay for things that represent ideas expressed visually.

Take Eno’s latest work for example. [Insert distinguished English accent.]

The “77 Million Paintings” software disc uses the screen of your computer or television to create a constantly evolving painting. The painting is generated from hand-made slides that are randomly combined by the computer using specially developed software. The software processes the music that accompanies the paintings in a similar way so the selection of elements and their duration in the piece are arbitrarily chosen, forming a virtually infinite number of variations. The result is that having created the seed of the work it becomes unpredictable even to the artist himself — and every viewer also has a unique experience of the painting.

The prevalence of powerful home computers means that it is now possible to mass-produce and distribute this art. This brings the concept of Eno’s generative light installations from the controlled space of the gallery into the viewer’s home and creates what Eno describes as “visual music” on what would otherwise be a dead space in the room. But it also raises questions about the concept of the “original” in art that Walter Benjamin could not have imagined when he wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Millions of Brian Eno originals will be created and then disappear only to be replaced by millions more.

In other words, Brian Eno made a screensaver and he wants you to buy it.