Scenius

Brian Eno's brilliant take on collective intelligence and creativity

One of the many reasons I’m so fascinated by groups is that I am a musician. Music, by its very nature, is often made more deep and rich and intense when it’s a group effort — when instruments and voices come together to create something that is more powerful than each instrument on its own.

Of course when we think of impactful musicians, we can think of groups: The Beatles, The London Symphony Orchestra, or Destiny’s Child (all totally equivalent in every way, I know).

But we also think of solo musicians as being singular geniuses — artists who have conceived of, executed, and performed their music all on their own. But whether we’re talking about artists from decades ago or in the modern era, it is rarely the case that one person truly accomplished all that on their own.

Boundary-breaking musician Brian Eno came up with a term for this - Scenius. Listen to him articulate this concept in his own words:

I think there are two versions of this. I sense that Eno is talking about communities of artists who create independent work, critique each others’ work, and support each other as they grow. And I agree — almost any independent artist or musician you can think of will likely have a community behind them that is owed some thanks for that person’s success. And this community may be a handful of people, or it may be a grand artistic movement.

The other side of this is collaboration. Of course, there are plenty of singular artists and musicians whose work is best represented on its own. But even those people have producers, engineers, other musicians who play on their records, promoters, agents, etc. So just because they are billed as a solo artist doesn’t mean there aren’t many other people collaborating to make that work of art successful. And then of course there are more visible collaborations like bands and symphonies and co-created artwork.

Capitalism makes this fuzzy because we could argue that the people supporting that solo artist are not collaborating but just supplementing the work because they are being paid. My view is that even if someone is being paid for their contribution, it’s still a form of collaboration. The success would not come if each person was not taking great care to make sure their piece was complimentary to the others.

What do you make of Scenius? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.