Scenius.

In February of last year I took a songwriting class. The teacher? Brian Eno. Yes, that Brian Eno. Online, twice a week. Day one was a lesson. Day two was sharing and critique of the music we made. In reflection, most of the sessions were Eno gracing us with stories. I described it as a bunch of people sitting around a fire, listening to Grandpa Eno tell stories. It was priceless, and I have to thank Elisabeth Hass for letting me know about the opportunity. She joined the class as well.

At some point a young college student taking the course asked him about finding people who cared about similar music. He was a young geology student in England who also made music, and he was struggling to find others to connect with over making music, let alone music in general.

Eno's answer was simple. Share your music.

What he meant was by sharing the music, people will find you because of the music. It’s a flare. A flag. A stake in the ground. Essentially, if you’re not connecting with the constrained group you’re a part of that’s okay. Find others interested in this part of you.

Though he didn’t go down this path during this particular discussion, Eno does talk about his concept of “Scenius”. Not genius. Scenius. The intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene. The communal form of what we usually attribute to individuals. The fallacy of a single genius.

Eno came to it by looking closely at the history of creative work and noticing that the story we tell doesn't match the evidence. We're taught that a few great figures appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution. Picasso. Kandinsky. Rembrandt. Lone geniuses lighting the way. But pull back the frame on any of them and you find a room of people. A scene. A web of people in conversation, feeding each other, pushing each other, making things possible for each other that none of them could have reached alone.

The Bauhaus wasn't Gropius alone. It was Gropius and Klee and Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy and Breuer and the students who learned from all of them simultaneously, in the same building, eating together, building together. Gropius certainly planted the flag. Not to mention the zeitgeist of the moment as critical inspiration. Remove any one of them and you get a different Bauhaus. The scene was the engine.

Black Mountain College understood this instinctively. Founded in 1933 in the mountains of North Carolina — the same year the Nazis forced the Bauhaus to close — it took in several Bauhaus refugees, including Josef and Anni Albers, and built something similarly improbable. No departments. No conventional grades. Art at the center of everything. Students and faculty working alongside each other, boundaries deliberately blurred. Out of that small, underfunded, experimental community came Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Charles Olson. An outsized proportion of the American avant garde, mid-century, from a college most people have never heard of.

The Cabaret Voltaire wasn't Hugo Ball performing alone. It was a room of exiles in Zürich, coalescing in a space in time. The work that came out of it was the product of that collision. The scene produced it. The individuals gave it form.

Detroit techno wasn't Juan Atkins alone or even the Belleville Three (Juan, Derrick, Kevin) — it was conversations between a handful of people in a specific place at a specific moment. Punk in London wasn't the Sex Pistols alone — when they played the show in Manchester, they triggered a scene that spawned entire movements. The work called people in. The people made more work. The scene became a movement.

This past Tuesday evening a collection of Lost Arts Members and friends met up in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago to experience Martin Atkins’s Post Punk & Industrial Music Museum (PPIM).

PPIM was launched 5 years ago. This was Martin’s flag in the ground. Started in his home. In that short period of time he’s received countless donations of ephemera from people’s personal collections from their years involved as musicians or fans in the scene. As many of the folks who joined the tour said since our visit — it’s overwhelming. Thousands of pieces documenting the historical arc of a movement, through collective action.

Martin’s actions and point of view are Eno’s mantra manifest in real time, over a lifetime.

That's scenius in action. Not the building. Not the curriculums. Not the objects. The conditions that allowed a particular group of people, in a particular place, to push each other further than any of them would have gone alone.

What I find most useful in Eno's thinking isn't the word itself. It's the implication underneath it.

By sharing the work you make, you offer others a signal to find you. You’ve planted a flag.

This is what Lost Arts stands for. Designing spaces that bring people together, around their creative work. Allowing space for folks to share works-in-progress, prototypes, ideas and questions. Vulnerability is a huge ask, yet an act that allows each of us to grow creatively. And each moment of vulnerability, that flag being planted in the ground, draws others in. To support, push back, provide alternate perspectives.