Brian Eno’s studio in Notting Hill is tucked away at the end of a cobbled mews, its facade a quarter of the normal size. The effect is like a kind of fairy-door, and as you enter, it opens on to a vast light-filled room with a spiral staircase at the centre. On one side, Eno, in a purple shirt, is hovering silently over a table top making marks on something. On the other, his latest collaborator, the Dutch artist and writer Bette Adriaanse, busies herself with the same task (they’re signing copies of their new book about art). An airy piano melody wafts over the scene: entering it feels like exhaling.

It does for me, anyway. I’ve been anxious about this interview, not least because of a warning from Eno’s assistant to avoid talking about his musical history, which he doesn’t feel is relevant; she apologises for flagging it up but thought she had “better be safe than sorry”. Eek. A few years ago a Guardian interviewer was given short shrift for daring to ask about Eno’s famous collaborations (“I so don’t want to talk about this,” a sleep-deprived Eno snapped). Is this going to be a case of never meet your heroes?

I’m reassured when Eno bounds over to ask if I’d like some “weird tea”. “I bet you’ve never had anything like this before. It’s from Morocco.” He proffers the tin and I breathe in a heady aroma of dates and roses. Tea brewed, we gather at a large table, Adriaanse showing me some of her notes for What Art Does, a small, illustrated book that attempts to address an enduring mystery. So why now? And why Eno?

The pair encountered each other at a dinner convened by the literary agent and salonista John Brockman. “I think the real spark came from the fact that we were both, from our slightly different directions, very engaged in trying to answer the same question,” Eno says. “I had met a 15-year-old who was talking about doing her A-levels. She said, ‘Well, I really want to do art because that’s what I like, but my teacher said I was too bright for that.’ I thought: that is really the death of a culture. When we decide that stuff we’ve been doing for the whole of human history is not as important as learning about FinTech or computer programming.” What Art Does is an attempt to correct that imbalance.

Eno himself was part of a generation of art students who shaped popular culture through music. He attended Winchester School of Art at the end of the 60s and in 1971 joined Roxy Music, the band founded by fellow fine art graduate Bryan Ferry. One of his tutors, computer art pioneer Roy Ascott, also taught Pete Townshend of the Who. As well as working as a solo musician and producer for everyone from David Bowie to Talking Heads to Coldplay, he’s continued to produce his own visual pieces – bold geometric etchings and glowing lightboxes.

But there were gaps in his education. “I would read everything I could about ‘what is art’, and the answers were so unconvincing to me. They were ridiculously romantic: ‘art is the central truth of human existence’, and bollocks like that. I wanted some sort of biological, psychological grip on why people did it. Because the thing that’s unavoidable is … everybody is living in art. You know, even people who don’t call themselves artists are doing makeup, choosing clothes, going to events like dances or raves or nightclubs.”

Adriaanse had come to similar conclusions. A polymath in her own right, her 2016 novel Rus Like Everyone Else drew on her experience as a postal worker in Amsterdam, where she lives with her husband. She’s also a visual artist and teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld art academy. “So as an art teacher, I was really trying to answer that question for myself. When you’re teaching baking, for instance, or racing-car driving or economics, you know what you’re teaching it for. And in art school, there’s this really wonderful mystery around it, and there are no rules – but it’s quite hard to teach something if you don’t know what it is and what it isn’t.”

“I’d been talking about what I thought art was for a very long time,” says Eno. He credits Adriaanse with providing the encouragement, but crucially the organisation – “I’m not very good at that” – to get it all down on paper. “I have to tell you, this could not have happened without Bette, I absolutely know that for sure. I would have gone to my grave thinking, fuck, I wish I’d written that damn book.”

So what does the damn book say? In one sense, it’s disarmingly simple; witty illustrations by Adriaanse accompanying an easily digestible text. “I think images invite you into a book in a different way,” Eno says. “Academic books never have any sense of joy to them. When we’re talking, we’re always laughing and joking as well, [so] why shouldn’t that be part of the book? And because the target audience I was thinking of was an intelligent teenager. That isn’t to say that I didn’t want anyone else to read it, but I thought if I can’t explain things simply enough for somebody of that age to get it, then I don’t understand it properly myself.”

The ideas are more complex than the presentation suggests, but not vastly. Neither is it exactly breaking new ground. Art is everywhere, they say, from fingernails to fine dining; art is not a message to be decoded, but takes on new meanings in the mind of each viewer; art allows us to experience emotions in a “safe” context, like a form of affective practice; art helps us to imagine new worlds, thereby expanding the boundaries of what’s possible in the real world. The point isn’t to be original, though, but to distil a lifetime’s worth of practical wisdom and reflection. The result is a kind of joyous manifesto: just the thing to inspire a teenager (or adult) into a new creative phase. Eno and Adriaanse conclude with a “Wish”: that the book helps us understand that “what we need is already inside us”, and that “art – playing and feeling – is a way of discovering it”.

Or, to put it another way, art helps us get in touch with our “deep likes”, a central concept in the book. So, what have they discovered about their own? For Adriaanse it’s “things like collecting stones and colour combinations, funny people, funny stories, funny incidents”, and more seriously “making connections between ideas – going deeper into ideas”.

“And I think one of Brian’s deep likes,” she tells me, “is when people have a talent or are good at something. So Brian can be very enthusiastic. He will say, ‘Oh, this man, he’s such a good listener. And that woman is such a wonderful dancer. You should see her dance. She’s like a snake.’” He chuckles at this, and agrees. “I sent a proposal to Channel 4 once that they should make a series of short films called ‘the ballet of work’, because I love watching people do their job, like watching somebody who makes pizzas and who’s done it for a long time: there’s such a ballet to the way that is done.”

He’s a fan of aphorisms, too: “I love finding beautiful encapsulations of ideas. Kevin Kelly [founding editor of Wired] has written a lovely book called Excellent Advice for Living. And it’s full of, sometimes very deep ideas in a few words, sometimes very trivial ones. [For example], he says, there’s no point in making a balcony that’s less than six feet deep. Nobody will use it.”

“A difference between me and Brian is that I’m really very much a writer,” Adriaanse adds. “So when I say things, it’s usually kind of all over the place, but Brian can say sentences that will stick. We’d just met and he said, ‘If we want a new world, we have to start making it right now, and whatever we are doing, we have to make it as though we are in that new world.’ And that just kept singing in my brain. It’s the same kind of talent that is in your lyrics. I think somebody nicknamed you Captain Hook.”

“Yeah, David.”

Bowie? “Yes.” But were these lyrical hooks or musical ones? “Musical, actually, I think he was referring to. I mean, it’s an advantage of being a very simple musician that you have to find something that works. And once you do, you think: that worked, I’ll just keep doing it. That’s a hook.”

“What’s a hook that you’re particularly proud of?” I venture, sensing that this might be a good moment to delve deeper into his musical history. “God,” he mutters. “I knew we’d get there.” Well, at least we got there organically, I say, and it wasn’t even me who mentioned Bowie. Adriaanse jumps in: “I know some hooks in the book that I’m proud of.” Eno thanks her for the out: “Go on, yeah! Let’s have some of those.” “Play is how children learn; art is how adults play,” she recites.

It is indeed a good hook, but why is it that he’s so reluctant to talk about the past? It is, after all, why so many people admire him, and why he has a platform to do stuff like this. “It really comes from doing interviews where people say” – and here he puts on the snivelling voice of the despised journo – “‘So what was it really like being in the studio with David Bowie?’ and you just think, fucking hell, man, it was great, but, you know, I’m somewhere else now.” (He told one interviewer that he has an “anti-nostalgia gene”.)

Adriaanse chimes in: “You don’t want to be admired, also.” “I don’t,” he nods. “I don’t like being admired. I don’t like being revered. That makes me feel very uncomfortable.” I wonder if he’s saying he doesn’t want to be the centre of attention, and that’s why he enjoys producing, rather than performing, but that’s not quite it. “What I really feel uncomfortable about is the thing that people do – which I think is a way of excusing themselves from being creative – where they go: ‘You’re so creative!’, and in that they’re saying: ‘I’m just a guy with a humdrum job who never thinks of anything new.’ And I want to say: ‘Just fucking get up off your knees and be proud of yourself! Don’t put it on me to be your agent in the world to do brilliant things.’”

It’s prickly but inspiring: a challenge to take responsibility for your own creative life. “So I have this idea of ‘scenius’,” he elaborates. “Genius is … the brilliance of an individual. Scenius is the fertility of a whole scene of people. So much of art history doesn’t acknowledge that at all. You know, it’s like: Picasso, Kandinsky, Rembrandt, these great individuals. But look at the world that they were in. There were a lot of other great individuals around them, and there were other people who don’t even get called artists, who facilitated. Curators, dealers, critics, people who ran salons, girlfriends, mistresses, wives, children.”

That makes sense. But surely he can understand why people imbue the musicians they love with special qualities, want to hear about them, find them exciting? They’re not expounding some theory of artistic production, they’re being fans. Or, if you like, making someone into an avatar for their dreams and desires. “I think that’s why you end up with Trumps,” Eno muses. Adriaanse helps me out: “It would be much harder to celebrate the community around Fela Kuti instead of him. It’s much more fun to celebrate him.”

“But as long as you recognise that it’s a kind of fiction that you’re talking about,” Eno says. “I just want to get away from that way of thinking. And so, if I’m suddenly cast in that light, I don’t want to live up to it. No, I don’t want to be that person. I always want to say to people: you could do it too. Whatever it is you think is so brilliant about me, you could do.”

If Eno is against the great man theory of history, what does he think about the possibility of AI taking over the reins of art? Would it matter if, instead of an auteur, there was a machine behind your favourite movie, song or painting? “Somebody said to me the other day, ‘I’ll be interested in AI when some product of AI makes me cry’, and I thought that was a very good test. I think it’s not possible unless you assume intentionality on the part of something being made.”

How about if you hear something, and it moves you, but you then discover it’s been produced by a computer. Does that negate the experience you’ve just had? “Well, a lot of my own music, of course, is made in similar ways. In fact, I’ve been close to being an AI artist for quite a long time, by inventing and setting up systems that make music. But although I’m not present and controlling the moment of the performance, I have, first of all, had the idea to do them. Secondly, I built the apparatus by which they are made. And that involves a lot of decisions, of trying out and thinking ‘that doesn’t work’, and ‘I’ll change the rules a bit’, and so on and so on.” His point is that you still need a curator, an editor, and that has to be a human being.

“The first thing you have to do is stop it going down into the chasm of mediocrity that it will always want to go into, because that’s the way it’s set up. If you think about it, even though it all sounds very, very complicated, it’s essentially a system for deciding what the next word is. I’m not trying to say I’m not fascinated by it. I am. But in my experience, the times it works are when people are very careful about what goes in and very critical about what comes out.”

Adriaanse reminds him that they created some half-decent “Brian Eno” material using a song generator. “It wasn’t too bad, but none of it was so good that I thought, Oh my God, I’ve got to release this.”

I ask what they’re both working on next. “Why is that such a hard question?” Adriaanse wonders. “Loads. I’m writing new stories, short stories, and this book has reignited my love for drawing alongside my writing.”

“Fucking hell, I don’t know,” Eno blurts. Adriaanse offers a couple of examples but he says he’s not allowed to talk about them yet. She pauses: “You’re making a really long song?”

“Yeah. So – oh God, I hate talking about things in the future because you kind of kill them.” How so? “It’s like putting down your child’s name for Eton before it’s born. You’ve sort of – you’ve started to push it in a direction.”

Nevertheless, he tells me, “one thing I’m very interested in is the idea of writing a new kind of song, and I’ve been thinking about this for quite a few years now. Something that is between long, slow, ambient music and a kind of almost not-songlike song. So a kind of song where the singer isn’t so important.”

It’s a blurry description, but then, as the saying goes, writing (or talking) about music is like dancing about architecture. In any case, I suggest that a lot of his work is already quite like that. “Well,” he says “that’s what my work would like to be. But I don’t think I’ve quite got there, or rather, I’ve started to think of a better way of doing that.”

I end with an obligatory current affairs question – what does he think of the new British government (we’re speaking before Trump won the US election) – and he’s quick off the bat: “crushing disappointment that they haven’t taken any principled stand on Gaza at all. Absolutely disgraceful, shocking and incredible. You know, what should a Labour government stand for if it isn’t for the oppressed and the underdog? When Starmer was fighting the election, I thought, well, of course, he can’t bring up such a hot topic as that, because [of] the Daily Mail. But it seems like that’s where his mind is.”

We’re almost out of time. Eno’s assistant has already hoved into view to warn us that our hour is pretty much up and Brian says he’s got 1,000 more copies of the book to sign (“1,777,” she clarifies). I’m grateful to have escaped without getting it in the neck for raking over the past, but there is one deep like I still want to explore. It’s one we share, actually: smell. I know that Eno is a perfume-head, like me, and What Art Does provides a convenient excuse to bring it up. In their eclectic reading list at the back of the book, alongside Baudrillard, Morse Peckham and “Wikipedia”, Adriaanse and Eno have included Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which aficionados know as one of the great books of art criticism of the 21st century (non-aficionado’s tend to think “Huh? Perfumes?”, until they read it).

It’s probably not the kind of thing Bob Woodward would do, but in case things got awkward, I have brought along a couple of samples given to me by perfumer Harry Sherwood, including a Gardenia accord. Eno is suddenly in raptures. “That’s really beautiful,” he says as he sniffs it. He beckons us over to a set of shelves decked with assorted bottles and jars. “I’ve got quite a collection over here, as you can see. I have, in another drawer back there, about 800 to 1,000”. Moving his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame trophy (for Roxy Music) out of the way, he wafts tomato leaf absolute in front of our noses, and then a strange, desiccated grey substance at the bottom of a bottle that looks like it came out of a souk – “It did”. It’s attar of clay, a rare concoction that exudes an earthy, sandalwood-like odour.

It feels like we could spend hours down this rabbit hole, and for a moment I get a glimpse of what it might be like to spark up Eno’s enthusiasm, to collaborate with him. It is, as the books says, just like play. But he apologises, and turns back to the studio – because it’s time for something new.