Sound & Vision

by Luca Beatrice (Editor), John Walker (Contributor)

Music and art have gone together at least as long as there's been singing in church, but "Sound & Vision" opens in 1967, when the covers of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (Peter Blake) and "The Velvet Underground and Nico" (Andy Warhol) announced that musical collaboration with Pop artists was here to stay. It moves on to the artist-muse relationship, with attention to Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, who lead to Punk, New Wave and the artists of the East Village. In the 1980s, art-school musicians like the Talking Heads and Sonic Youth fused the primitive energies of rock with the intellectual refinements of art school, emerging with a unified aesthetic just as videos were raising the importance of the visual. Today, videos and art of all kinds continue to create and influence the market for music, and collaborations are thriving, from schoolmates Damien Hirst and Blur to partners Bjork and Matthew Barney and ur-hipsters Beck and Marcel Dzama. "Sound & Vision" observes the fertile mixing of photography, painting, music and video, a node of interdisciplinary connections that has slowly become a major influence in the historical development of both pop music and visual arts. Includes works from Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Raymond Pettibon, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley and Matthew Barney, among others.

Genres: Music

260 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

Luca Beatrice was an Italian art critic.

Reviews

[Dragan Nanic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Design of this book is simply amazing. It is a companion piece to the exhibition held in Italy that tried to understand and explain the connection between (modern) music and (visual) arts by providing essays and examples on the contemporary music industry. It includes parts of interviews as well as critical writings that contain truly inspirational insights. Yet the true value is in the way it combines them with the striking and memorable images both new and common ones from videos still running everywhere around.

[Mego]

The reason I will never finish reading this is because it's a "smart" book. Lot's of great essays about the intersection of visual art and pop culture. The other night I read for about 2 hours and made it through two of them. There was this also super nifty vignette by John Lennon about the first two times he met Yoko Ono. Those Italians sure can think!