Art Record Covers. 40th Ed.

Visual and music production have had a close relationship since modernism, with artists creating covers and records that evoke an aural encounter. Francesco Spampinato's anthology presents 450 covers and records by visual artists from the 1950s to today, exploring how modernism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, postmodernism, and various forms of contemporary art practice have informed this collateral field of visual production.

Format: Hardback
Length: 512 pages
Publication date: 07 September 2021
Publisher: Taschen GmbH

Since the dawn of modernism, the relationship between visual and music production has been a profound and enduring one. From Luigi Russolos 1913 Futurist manifesto, LArte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise), to Marcel Duchamps 1925 double-sided discs, Rotoreliefs, the 20th century witnessed an ever-more fertile exchange between sounds, shapes, marks, and melodies, and different fields of composition and performance. In Francesco Spampinato's remarkable anthology of artists' record covers, we delve into the rhythm of this unique cultural history. The book presents 450 covers and records by visual artists from the 1950s to the present, exploring how modernism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, postmodernism, and various forms of contemporary art practice have all informed this collateral field of visual production and supported the mass distribution of music with defining imagery that swiftly and suggestively evokes an aural encounter. Along the way, we find Jean-Michel Basquiat's urban hieroglyphs for his own Tartown record label, Banksys stenciled graffiti for Blur, and a skewered Salvador Dalí butterfly on Jackie Gleason's Lonesome Echo. Insightful analyses and fact sheets accompany the covers, listing the artist, performer, album name, label, year of release, and information on the original artwork. Interviews with Tauba Auerbach, Shepard Fairey, Kim Gordon, Christian Marclay, Albert Oehlen, and Raymond Pettibon add personal accounts on the collaborative relationship between artists and musicians.

Weight: 1464g
Dimension: 165 x 224 x 44 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783836588164