Art and Music

Four Rock Star Artists to Know
11/11 | Caitlin Ruttle

After visiting rocker Patti Smith’s photography exhibition earlier this week, we’re looking into the visual art careers of a few more familiar names: Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, David Byrne of Talking Heads, Lizzi Bougatsos of Gang Gang Dance, and Moby. From New Wave to No Wave and electronica, these icons have been making visual art even while touring behind genre-defying music.

Living Objects: Patti Smith's Polaroids
11/08 | Lucy Li

Back when Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were starving artists living in a mold-infested, closet-sized apartment in Clinton Hill, they took turns visiting museum exhibitions because they could only afford one ticket with Smith’s meager bookstore clerk salary. On their way to the subway station after stopping at the then newly opened Whitney Museum, Mapplethorpe once told Smith, “One day we’ll go in together, and the work will be ours.”

Interview: How PS1 Gets Its Strange, Cerebral Dance Music
09/02 | Laura Gonzalez

On summer Saturdays since 1998, MoMA PS1’s courtyard in Long Island City, Queens has welcomed crowds ready to dance amidst the immersive architecture projects of the museum’s Young Architects Program. The 2011 season spans acid house legend DJ Pierre, noisy electronic standbys Black Dice, and newcomers like SBTRKT and Clams Casino, but perhaps most surprising is the diverse crowd – from adults jumping around on the dance floor to toddlers exploring various in situ installations (this year’s favorite is a wooden platform that spouts water, much to several three-year-olds’ delight).

Back to New Wave New York
08/12 | Mayukh Sen

The subjects of Laura Levine’s iconic rock photographs were in constant search of expression. To her, musicians were not airbrushed spectacles, but vulnerable, energetic, highly personable creatures worthy of our gaze. She captured such culturally salient figures as Boy George, Grace Jones, and Joe Strummer in a state of rawness and urgency – before, say, Madonna really knew she was Madonna. For a time, Levine was one of post-punk and New Wave’s most avid chroniclers, the eye of a certain place, time, and way of existing.

Sonic Warfare
07/14 | Jarrett Moran

The ideal 21st century weapon is invisible, seemingly noninvasive. When drones, not soldiers, are fighting in Libya, the president can all the more easily eschew congressional approval to conduct a war. The weapon more invisible than a hovering drone: sound. Sound is used in torture, on the battlefield, and to break up protests. At the outset of his book Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman relates how the Israeli air force creates sonic booms over the Gaza Strip, producing walls of sound that trigger nose bleeds, broken windows, anxiety attacks, and sleeplessness.

Touring Through Alien Spaces
05/11 | Moby

Moby has released some of the best selling electronica albums of all time and worked with, among others, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, Brian Eno, New Order, and Public Enemy. Yet, when we visited his NYC studio, we learned that he is as much part of the art world as the music world.