Critique of Celebrity Art Philosophy Books by Brian Eno, Rick Rubin, and Alain de Botton

Musician Brian Eno published What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory in January 2024, presenting art through simplistic diagrams and illustrations. Rick Rubin released The Creative Act in 2023, offering spiritual guidance on creativity with new-age affirmations. Both authors are criticized for assuming low cognitive capacity in readers, ignoring historical art thought, and adopting self-help language. Alain de Botton's 2014 book Art as Therapy and his intervention at the Rijksmuseum that year proposed art as therapeutic, adding Post-it notes to masterpieces like Rembrandt's The Night Watch (1642) with banal questions. De Botton's business The School of Life operates in London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and São Paulo, selling expensive experiences and conversation cards. The critique argues these approaches reflect a dumbing down of culture, exploiting anti-intellectualism and the publishing industry's preference for celebrity over specialists. Public art discourse is often limited to NFTs, AI, or media personalities like Banksy. Rosanna McLaughlin, author of the forthcoming book Against Morality (2025), highlights a crisis in art's societal role, where its purpose has become overly broad, leading to panic about its function. The article suggests cultural intelligence is undervalued, allowing such simplistic philosophies to flourish.