What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory

In What Art Does, Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse (credited on the cover as Bette A.) set out an "unfinished theory" of why people make and need art.

The book is richly illustrated and written in plain language. It treats art as something made by everyone, one that forms communities, opens up the world and can change the people who meet it. Faber published the hardback in January 2025, and reviewers in the Guardian and the Irish Times described it as a distillation of Eno's thinking about art.

Eno came to prominence in the early 1970s as a founding member of Roxy Music and has produced records for Talking Heads, Devo, U2 and Coldplay, among others. He is also a visual artist and has kept a published diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices. Bette A. is an Amsterdam-born artist and writer who studied Image and Language at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.