Art Record Covers – Francesco Spampinato

Taschen, Hohenzollernring 53, 50672 Köln, www.taschen.com

The reason I was turned on this book – I thought it is about record covers… of course it is, but the main focus is on artists that also do record covers. Now this might sound confusing since most record covers are done by artists, I hope this confusion will be clear in the end. After an introduction by the author there is six interviews with participating artists (Tauba Auerbach, Shepard Fairey, Kim Gordon, Christian Marclay, Albert Oehlen and Raymond Pettibon). Introduction and interviews are also in German and French. The main part of the book is in alphabetical order (cover artists names) and shows over 500 album covers from the 50’s to today created by artists.

Each artist gets briefly introduced, his work style described and often the displayed work also gets explained (that can be pretty annoying to boring, almost feels like reading a boring review, because the music is also talked about…..). Every album shown has this information: art (by), music (from), year (released), label (name), format, genre (of the music), artwork (style). Now reading over 250 of this brief introductions is not so entertaining after a while, especially when one has never ever heard of either the artist or the band and if the art shown is not very interesting does not really help. That is not the case for everything, but if you expect to see mainly cool stuff like Raymond Pettibon, Banksy, Kim Gordon and other Punk/Underground related artists or bands – think twice before you get this book. Of course, reading through it all, I found a few interesting details that I did not know before, but in the end, it is too much art for me. So in other words, if you are interested in art, that appears on record covers or like artists that also play music (a lot of it, the art and the music, is experimental) this is a fantastic book. It is big in size (30,5 x 30,5 x 5,1 cm) a lot of the covers are in original format and you can learn basics about more then 250 artists and their art on record covers. 448 pages, hardcover, 49,99 Euro (dolf)

Isbn 978-3836540292

[Trust # 185 August 2017]