Publications

I, Wannabe

By: Adam Sutherland

Contemporary art’s relationship to popular music is a kind of Rock Dad – over-enthusiastic and missing the point, arriving too early to take the kids home from the disco and then insisting on dancing. The history of a relationship between contemporary art and popular music is one of empathy and mutual interest. This article looks at the impact of this attempted fusion on the evolution of contemporary art practice, based on the premise that in the past fifty years, music culture has led artists to a realisation that other creative activities have usurped the traditional artist’s role as communicators, rebels, romantic heroes and innovators. This is increasingly forcing artists to rethink their image, activity and role and ultimately to reinvent the notion of the artist. Popular music culture is so much about what it’s not about: this act of definition, identification – a teenage list of what you don’t like, as if defining what you are not will resolve what you could be – a way of defining through refining that results in the narrow confines of particular music forms and their subdivisions. This idea of a synthesis of references to produce an...

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