The Album Art Music Left Behind
The Art of Noise exhibition at Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York examines the symbiotic relationship between album cover design and musical perception across decades. Curated from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the show presents iconic works including Peter Saville’s Unknown Pleasures for Joy Division (1979), Reid Miles’s modernist Blue Note Records covers from the 1950s–60s, and Niklaus Troxler’s Swiss jazz festival posters. The exhibition juxtaposes these with ephemeral materials—flyers, zines, and xeroxed invitations from the 1970s disco and club scenes. A panel discussion featuring photography critic Vince Aletti and curator Matthew Higgs explores how visual design shapes listening experience, noting that many legendary covers were created without direct engagement with the music itself. The show elevates previously disposable graphic artifacts to museum status, documenting the visual culture surrounding recorded sound across modernist, jazz, and underground music contexts.
Original article published on Hyperallergic — AI-generated summary. Visit the website to read the full article at the source. Image via Hyperallergic.
