The Recording Artist as Fine Artist:

An Exploration of Parallels Between Contemporary Art and Music

Joseph Hedges

There is only one Art; painting and music are only different fields,
part of this general Art.

- Carl Friedrich Zelter1

The visual arts and music are largely presented as two separate histories with their own

unique artists and legacies, connected only by the occasional common intellectual movement. In
the last fifty years the worlds of popular music and contemporary art have collided with
increasing frequency. The dawn of the information age and ever quickening advancements in
technology have contributed to the blurring of once rigidly defined borders between areas of
creative expression such as painting, sculpture, drawing, and music. Contemporary artists now
must employ a variety of mediums to communicate ideas, often moving freely between the audio
and visual worlds. Furthermore, the contemporary music album has become a form of fine art,
and todays pop and rock stars are as creatively innovative across a variety of mediums as any
conventional contemporary visual artist. To understand the current convergence of music and
contemporary art, it is important to first understand the development and the links between roles
of visual arts and popular music within western society throughout history.

The visual arts did not always enjoy the same liberal arts status as music. In the middle

ages, painting was seen as a craft. In the high Renaissance, figures like Leonardo, Titian, and
Michaelangelo worked to elevate the status of painting, in some cases even advocating the

1 Morton, Marsha, and Peter L. Schmunk. The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New
York: Garland, 2000. Print, p. 1.

superiority of painting over poetry and music. 2 Leonardo, who was both a musician and painter,
showed that the visual composition of a painting could be conceived of in terms of mathematical
relationships--the same kinds of relationships that govern the organization of music. With the
introduction of new ideas like perspective, painting finally became a mental science, and
numbers became an important part of artists techniques.3 For centuries thereafter, painting
enjoyed a position of great importance in Western culture as the premier visual fine art.

How we experience painting and visual arts was greatly influenced by the Romantic

movement in music. Until the 19th century, public performances of music had encouraged
audience participation. Then, in European theaters, participation gave way to silent listening
combined with dimmed lighting to create a reflective mood, contributing to an almost religious
ambiance. Visual artists also began seeking to evoke a mood of spiritual contemplation in their
works, and museums came to resemble concert halls in their enforcement of silent reverence.4
Today the secular fine arts remain our shared cultural religion, and the enjoyment of popular
music is the most popular mode of worship.

Museums are still places of hushed contemplation, but the art of painting has lost much of

its popular appeal due to the invention of photography and the now ubiquitous presence of new
mediums like video. The forms of visual arts are now incredibly varied and often difficult to
categorize, and at the same time more accessible to the common person than at any other point in
human history. Booming technologies like the internet have brought a seemingly unending
stream of images, music, and video into the homes of ordinary citizens everywhere. The

Reti, Ladislao, and Emil M. Buhrer. The Unknown Leonardo. New York: Abradale, 1990. Print, p. 80.

Ibid., p. 80.

4 Morton, Marsha, and Peter L. Schmunk. The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New
York: Garland, 2000. Print.

majority of these types of media can be classified as either commercial art or fine art.
Commercial art includes car advertisements and cereal boxes while fine art is generally
understood to be created primarily for its aesthetic purposes and judged for its meaningfulness.

The sheer amount of visual art produced and distributed today and the incredible

variation of its intended audience and purpose has made maintaining these strict categorizations
of commercial or fine art difficult. Furthermore, with international corporations pumping more
money into creative pursuits like movies, television and internet commercials, works of
commercial art have become incredibly sophisticated and aesthetically pleasing. Many films and
music albums are judged for their aesthetic and personal creative meaningfulness, while also
enjoying great commercial success. Independent films and conceptual music albums especially
could be seen as walking the line between fine and commercial art. Conversely, many successful
contemporary artists like Shephard Fairey seem to be as interested in manufacturing, marketing,
and selling their product as they are with presenting a meaningful creative vision; Faireys own
website, obeygiant.com features the slogan manufacturing quality dissent since 1989. 5
Faireys unabashedly capitalist attitude and his consistent creative aesthetic has undoubtedly
been influenced by the kind of marketing savvy and clarity of vision found in the careers of the
pop and rock stars whose portraits he exhibits and sells. Fairey has grown up in a postwar youth
culture that spawned an explosion of interest in music unlike anything in recorded human
history; that influence is well documented in his art and the art of many other contemporary
artists.

Vallen, Mark. "Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey." Art for a Change. Dec. 2007. Web. 19 Apr. 2010. <http://www.artfor-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm>.

Since the 1950s, the status of music in society, and its influence on popular culture is

unparalleled.6 While popular interest in some visual art forms including painting has been
diminished by technological advances and new media, music has simply adapted to enhance
rather than compete in these arenas. The moving picture, for example, may have done much to
devalue the painting or even the photograph, but it has created placement opportunities for
musicians.7 The power of music in society was recently demonstrated again by the success of
American Idol, an international television phenomenon featuring singers competing for votes.
During the 2006 season, half a billion votes were cast for contestants singing on the show--about
ten times more votes cast than in any U.S. presidential election in history.8 Today the moving
image rarely exists without music, but music endures as a powerful art form in its own right.

The capability of the visual arts to match the successes of music depends largely on how

one interprets the existing state of affairs. Despite more artists making more contemporary art in
more ways, the audience for contemporary art has been shrinking as artworks become more
conceptual and difficult for the non-art fan to understand. The art produced today that makes its
way into museums and galleries is anything but simple. 9 At the same time, the prices of sales
for contemporary works of art are soaring. 10 This is evidence that with some exceptions the
contemporary art world now caters to a specialized audience of mostly educated, upper class

6 Blanning, T. C. W. The Triumph of Music: the Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard UP, 2008. Print., p. 331.
7

Ibid., p. 330.

Ibid., p. 330.

Heartney, Eleanor. Art & Today. London: Phaidon, 2008. Print, p. 13.

10 Blanning, T. C. W. The Triumph of Music: the Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard UP, 2008. Print, p. 329.

people. Contemporary musicians, by contrast, have managed to retain and build an enormous
audience of people from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

Curiously, the contemporary art world has been somewhat reluctant to embrace music,

especially popular music. The souvenir shop at the Tate Modern in London, one of the foremost
contemporary art museums in the world, features many books on painting, architecture,
sculpture, cinema, design, but only a small selection of CDs; mostly interviews from visual
artists.11 Much of the music that does become officially accepted in the contemporary art world
is often abstract or noisy to the point of being unlistenable for the general public. A recent
exhibit at Cincinnatis Contemporary Arts Center, for example, featured C. Spencer Yeh, a
multimedia artist who creates videos as well as experimental Noise Rock. 12 Abstraction in
music has been largely unaccepted by society, while ideas about abstraction in the world of
visual arts have been so wholeheartedly assimilated into our shared visual understanding that
Pablo Picassos Demoiselles D'Avignon, a seminal work in visual abstraction, is immediately
recognizable by many, having lost much of its shock value. By contrast, Viennese Modernist
composer Arnold Schoenbergs similarly important first atonal musical works have escaped the
general consciousness and remain difficult to appreciate for most.

The composer Shoenberg was also a talented visual artist, and collaborated with the

Russian Modernist painter Wassily Kandinsky in unearthing connections between the visual and

11

Stubbs, David. Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don't Get Stockhausen. Winchester, UK: O, 2009.
Print, p. 7.
12 "C. Spencer Yeh's Standard Deviation." CityBeat | Cincinnati News, Music, Art, Movies, Opinion, Events, Theater,
Dance and Literature |. Web. 19 Apr. 2010. <http://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-19800-c-spencer-yehsstand.html>.

sonic realms.13 The influence of music in the work of visual artists is apparent throughout all of
art history, from the rhythmically undulating areas of color in the works of Van Gogh (who loved
composers Wagner and Hector Berlioz)14 , to James McNeil Whistlers painting titles Symphony
in White No. 1 or Arrangement in Grey and Black, which alluded to a strong formalist
connection between the two realms. In the 19th century the Paragone, the debate which began in
the Italian Renaissance for a the superior art form, gave way to an interest in borrowing and
retranslating between the musical and visual universes.

While the words we use to describe music and art are often the same, the process of

literal translation remains quite subjective, as no universally accepted guidebook has been
published to standardize the way these sonic and visual vocabularies are transformed.
Consequently, artists have imaginatively translated line into melody and rhythm, space into
dynamics and texture, color into timbre, and form into form, and vice versa for each of these and
more15 . Synesthetia, or a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to
another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain
color, 16 is well documented but its peculiarities remains relatively different from artist to artist
(or musician to musician). Sixty types of synesthesia have been recorded.17 Kandinsky is said to

13

Smith, Roberta. "Kandinsky and Schoenberg, Seen and Heard on Canvas." The New York Times. 24 Oct. 2003.
Web. 19 Apr. 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/24/arts/art-review-kandinsky-and-schoenberg-seen-andheard-on-canvas.html?pagewanted=1>.
14 Morton, Marsha, and Peter L. Schmunk. The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Century. New
York: Garland, 2000. Print, p. 182.
15

Mendelsohn, Alex. "Evenings for Educators: Music & Art." Evenings for Educators. Cincinnati Art Museum,
Cincinnati. 17 Mar. 2010. Lecture.
16
17

Dictionary.com. Web. 19 Apr. 2010. <http://www.dictionary.com>.

"Types of Synesthesia." Types of Synesthesia. Web. 19 Apr. 2010. <http://home.comcast.net/~sean.day/html/

types.htm>.

have been a true perceptual synesthete, as opposed to artists or musicians who use synesthesia as
an intellectual idea.18

The conventionally conceived parallels between avant guard music and avant guard

painting may be seen as inaccurate due to a misinterpretation of corresponding aesthetic values;

perhaps abstraction in the world of music does not necessarily mean a tearing down of the
commonly accepted diatonic tonal system. There may be something as fundamentally human-whether innate or socially constructed--about melody and harmony in music as there is about the
use of color, or the rectangle or square in the visual arts. Within the four sided visual
compositional system, the possibilities are limitless, as evidenced by the amazing variety of
artistic creations that continue to manifest in the worlds of painting, photography, and video.
From this perspective, despite the message sent by many of todays museums, contemporary art
finds its parallel with not only avant guard music or art rock or experimental music but all music,
including rock, pop, jazz, and classical.

Jackson Pollock, unquestionably a leader of the abstract expressionist movement, loved

listening to Jazz music. He enjoyed the rhythm as well as its naked presentation of honest and
deeply felt emotion, saying Jazz music was the only other creative thing happening in the
country. 19 Jazz also seems to have influenced artists like Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, and
American cubist painter Stuart Davis.20

However, in the early 1950s when Americans were celebrating the visual achievements of

abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning (who
18 Cytowic, Richard E., and David Eagleman. Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2009. Print.
19
20

O'Meally, Robert G. The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. Print.

Rubin, David S. It's Only Rock and Roll: Rock and Roll Currents in Contemporary Art. Munich: Prestel, 1995.
Print, p. 12.

were all undoubtedly influenced by music and creating extremely musical paintings), the cultural
worlds of painting and then emerging rock and roll music could not be further apart.21 Painters
like Pollock developed a mythic status. They were seen as heroes, and their works were seen as
high art, elevated beyond the realms of everyday human experiences.22 It was expected that
works of art were not to be consumed by the middle class or the general populace, but by an elite
group of wealthy art patrons with enough information and cultural sensitivity to understand the
work. Rock and Roll music, however, was embraced by young people from the middle class
who yearned for personal freedom and rebellion. It was gritty and dangerous, rooted in a
fascination with an underground black culture.

By 1956 teenagers accounted for more than half of all record sales.23 That year, Andy

Warhol showed drawings of Elvis Presley at a gallery in New York, marking one of the first
direct references to Rock and Roll in a contemporary art exhibition.24 Warhol was making a
living as an illustrator, which often required him to create album art for major record labels.25

Andy Warhol is perhaps the first example of a contemporary artist who was intimately

linked to the rock music scene. Warhols lifelong obsession with celebrity spawned hundreds of
innovative pop art portraits featuring musicians, as well as well-known album covers for bands
like the Velvet Underground and The Rolling Stones. By the mid 1960s, Warhols studio was a

21

Ibid., p 96.

22

Ibid., p. 12.

23

Rubin, David S. It's Only Rock and Roll: Rock and Roll Currents in Contemporary Art. Munich: Prestel, 1995.
Print.

24

Ibid., p. 12.

25

Ibid., p. 16.

headquarters for New York art culture.26 At the factory, the worlds of contemporary art, music,
and performance converged, foreshadowing an increasing tendency of confluence in the avant
guard.

As rock and roll became assimilated into the mainstream in the 1960s, it became more

than just a style of music; rock and roll is often seen as a unique aesthetic, a set of values, or
even a way of life.27 Bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones exemplified these ideas.
Youth culture exploded, and young people were empowered by a new sense of community that
was unimaginable just a few years before. This empowerment, led by musicians, gave rise to
important movements in contemporary art such as feminism.

The Beatles have had an unprecedented influence on popular consciousness. After their

rise to incredible international fame, The Beatles underwent a transformation from clean cut pop
stars to gritty, artistic, creative visionaries.28 Their social consciousness, willingness to
experiment, and postmodern artistic sensibilities positioned them in society not as performers or
musicians but as powerful artists, in every sense of the word. This marked a major shift in the
way we think about musicians and artists.

Significantly, these cultural shifts in the way recording artists presented themselves and

were received were benefited by new technologies that enabled sonic experimentation.
Multitrack recording became possible, allowing instruments to be recorded on multiple tracks at
different times, effectively ending the need for musicians to play together in the studio, and
opening up limitless possibilities of layering and texture. Today, songwriters are no longer
26 Molon, Dominic. Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2007.
Print, p. 13.
27

Ibid., p. 12.

28 Grossman, Loyd. A Social History of Rock Music: from the Greasers to Glitter Rock. New York: McKay, 1976.
Print, p. 32.

simply musicians but recording artists. Since albums like The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely
Hearts Club Band (widely regarded as the first concept album) and The Beach Boys Pet Sounds,
the recording studio is more akin to painters studio than a performance hall. Recording artists
now are free to combine instruments and sounds in odd or exciting new ways, using acoustic and
digital sounds and classical and contemporary ideas. As early as the 1960s, recording artists like
Frank Zappa were employing dadaist tendencies of collage and eclecticism on music albums.29
The album is not a recording of a performance but a fixed work of art in its own right, as rich,
complex, and layered as any painting, drawing, or sculpture.

In the same way that contemporary artists such as Matthew Ritchie and Marilyn Minter

are now more frequently incorporating a variety of media into their exhibits, the recording artist
has long been expected to venture into other areas of creative expression including the creation
of album art, concert posters, websites, and music videos, while maintaining an interest in
contemporary fashion for photo shoots and stage performances. The recording artists cultural
role is essentially an aesthetic ambassador to masses. Often, due to time constraints or
limitations of technical knowledge, recording artists simply direct these other creative pursuits.
The tendency of artist as director or curator finds its parallel in the contemporary art world with
works like Matthew Barneys innovative Cremaster series. In many art films and installations,
the contemporary artists functions primarily as a creative visionary who hires a team of
professional craftspeople to execute his or her projects. The Cremaster films are essentially long
music videos. The music video, an important part of the recording artists creative repertoire,
can be seen as fine art videos in that they often feature nonlinear narratives and unusual imagery.

29 Watson, Ben. "Frank Zappa as Dadaist: Recording Technology and the Power to Repeat Frank Zappa as Dadaist:
Recording Technology and the Power to Repeat." 15.1 (1996): 109-37. Routledge, Part of the Taylor & Francis
Group. Web.

Barneys Cremaster films may focus on the visual rather than audio information, but they employ
the kind of extravagant set design and editing techniques used by recording artists in big budget
music videos since the 1980s.

It is not surprising that many visual artists are also accomplished musicians, and vice

versa. Famous recording artists who also create visual art are Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Kim
Gordon, Miles Davis, Tony Bennett, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, David Byrne,
to name just a few. Some recording artists like Marilyn Manson use their visual art as another
arm of their brand or aesthetic practice. Mansons art tends to be a strikingly similar
aesthetically to his music, a fact that he uses to great advantage by selling his artwork on his
official website. Many recording artists have been accused of using fame as a substitute for
talent to advance their visual art careers.30 Some, like Joni Mitchell have asserted that they were
visual artists first, and musicians later. These frequent accusations may signal some reluctance
within the art world or society at large to accept the recording artist as fine artist or as someone
making high art. However, it is not uncommon for bands to be formed in art schools, or while
studying visual arts. Art school attendees include powerhouse musicians The Beatles, Talking
Heads, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and more recent recording artists like M.I.A. and
Imogen Heap. However, these artists seem to have traded their status as future contemporary
artists for pop stars. Unlike painter and sculptor, singer and songwriter, or movie star and
fashion designer, the two categories of contemporary artist and pop star seem to be mutually
exclusive.

30

Cochrane, Lauren. "Does This Art Rock?" The Guardian | Guardian.co.uk. 23 Oct. 2007. Web. 19 Apr. 2010.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2007/oct/23/doesthisartrock>.

Although many important visual artists such as 80s neo-expressionist Jean Michel

Basquiat were also musicians, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Patti Smith are the only three
American recording artists to have successfully moved from the world of contemporary art into
pop music and maintained their contemporary art credibility.31 Remarkably, Anderson is the
only performance artist to have a hit record: the album Big Science, released in 1982. Or perhaps
Anderson is simply the only recording artist given the label of performance artist by the art
world. In books about contemporary art, much has been made of Andersons innovative fusion
of sound and video. Anderson is said to write her own music and vocals; and her unique stage
presence is enhanced through her innovative use of sound, light, motion, and the use of
projections--strong graphic images combined with photographs. She uses any and all methods to
convey her message. 32 However, the above description could be applied to almost any
recording artist working on a national level today. Recording artists are often involved in
selecting or creating video projections for their live shows. Contemporary rock bands like Sigur
Rs employ projections on their tours and in videos. Madonna recently used contemporary artist
Marilyn Minters videos at her live concerts. Still, only Laurie Anderson enjoys the art worlds
distinction of being a performance artist.

David Byrne, who attended the Rhode Island School of Design with all the members of

the Talking Heads, has also been interested in expressing the connections between music and
contemporary art. A recent David Byrne installation Playing the Building explores the
possibility of an interior space as an instrument. Mechanical devices are connected to the

31

Frith, Simon, and Howard Horne. Art into Pop. London: Methuen, 1987. Print. p. 32.

32

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003. Print. p. 283

building, which is connected to an organ, allowing a user to play the space.33 Contemporary
artist Tim Hawkinson also recently transformed an interior space into a sound producing
installation using the idea of an organ as a springboard.34 Byrnes Playing the Building and
Hawkinsons berorgan embody an interest in unifying sound and visual experiences, as well as
the idea of an instrument or performance as a part of the visual experience through its particular
form and sheer magnitude. Hawkinson, an accomplished installation artist and sculptor, is also a
musician and maker of musical instruments.

Laurie Anderson and David Byrne seem to be exceptions to the rule. There may be a

cultural prejudice against accepting recording artists as fine artists. There is an equally puzzling
prejudice against contemporary artists in mainstream media. These distinctions are socially
constructed and in a way arbitrary, as evidenced by the multitude of recording artists with crossmedia proficiency and art school connections. Also of note are social relationships and
marriages such as Icelandic singer/songwriter Bjrk and spouse Matthew Barney, Laurie
Anderson and singer/songwriter Lou Reed, or most famously, John Lennon and acclaimed
contemporary artist Yoko Ono.

The pursuits of contemporary art and popular music are framed as academic or pure art

versus commercial, when in reality, the recording artists motivations may be quite similar or
exactly the same as those of the contemporary artist: personal expression and money. There is an
attitude, however, in the art world of art for arts sake that tends to reject the notion of art
making that leads to financial gain. This attitude is occasionally echoed in the sentiments of
punk and indie rock musicians. However, since early in rock and roll history there were rock
33

Byrne, David. "Playing the Building." DAVIDBYRNE.COM. Web. 19 Apr. 2010. <http://www.davidbyrne.com/
art/art_projects/playing_the_building/>.
34

"Tim Hawkinson's Uberorgan." The Getty. Web. 19 Apr. 2010. <http://www.getty.edu/visit/events/

hawkinson.html>.

stars. The cover of Rolling Stone Magazine is seen as the pinnacle of musical achievement. For
musicians and fans, there is an expectation of success in music, and success is not often regarded
as an obstacle to creative expression. Conversely, a plethora of artists from Tool to Radiohead
enjoyed even greater artistic freedom and made even more innovative records after their initial
success. For the visual artist, however, there is a cultural expectation of poverty and a stigma
attached to success. Figures like Thomas Kinkaid reinforce this vision of the successful
contemporary artist as commercial sellout. Kinkaids art is extremely popular with Americans,
yet his art is viewed as kitsch and without substance by many other contemporary artists and art
critics. For many contemporary artists, the path to success may be perceived as being tied to
artistic compromise.

Perhaps the enduring distinctions between artists and recording artists are also

perpetuated by our academic art institutions which frequently place tradition over practical
commercial value or public demand. Universities rarely offer academic courses concerning the
creation of pop or rock music, an activity which provides an opportunity for enormous financial
and social rewards, yet teach historical techniques in the visual arts such as wet lab photograph
developing and printmaking, activities that are dangerous and for which there exist little
application opportunities in the commercial world.

Despite these sociological framing mechanisms, the recording artist and the

contemporary visual artist are the same type of character. In postmodern society, being an artist
is an existential condition; it is seen as a natural disposition or inclination, where medium has
become increasingly arbitrary.35 One could argue the importance of specialization for the sake of

35 Lovejoy, Margot. Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, 1997. Print, p. 278.

thoroughness of exploration and accumulation of skill in a given medium, but the facts point
toward an increasing trend away from specialization and towards assimilation, as artists of all
sorts grow up in a world where information--and information about art-making--is free and
readily available. Additionally, through computer aided rendering, recording, and mixing
software, new images and sounds can be created so rapidly that their impact has been weakened.
Thus the challenge for a postmodern artist working in any medium becomes how to process and
reassemble so much audiovisual information, and so many skills into a new cohesive,
marketable, creative vision.

One might argue that technology has propped up creative endeavors so completely that

actual skill has become impossible to discern from production value. This manifests itself in
figures like visual artist Shepard Fairey and recording artist Brittany Spears. There are serious
questions about Faireys ability to draw36 and Brittany Spears skills as a singer. These are
troublesome concerns for some since historically, we have thought of contemporary artists as
possessors of drawing skill, and recording artists as possessors of vocal ability. To further
complicate this issue, the postmodern audience is more tolerant when it comes to matters of
authenticity, as evidenced by increasing appropriation in contemporary art paralleled with
sampling in popular music. The use of Autotune on the lead vocal tracks in popular music may
be the ultimate manifestation of this lack of concern for authenticity, as a once accepted
corrective tool is now frequently used as a familiar effect.

What is lost in terms of authenticity for some artists may be gained in the ability for other

artists to innovate and combine mediums. Contemporary art now includes light and audio sensor
controlled environments, film, interactive paintings, interactive sculptures, and every other kind
36

Vallen, Mark. "Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey." Art for a Change. Dec. 2007. Web. 19 Apr. 2010. <http://
www.art-for-a-change.com/Obey/index.htm>.

of inter-media creative explorations imagined and not yet invented. For the skilled artist,
technology is a tool that enables art to be created and modified more quickly and with greater
ease. Contemporary artist Matthew Ritchie creates installations that combine elements of video,
painting, sculpture, and interactive games, which are all rooted in his unique style of drawing.
Jn r Birgisson, Icelandic singer/songwriter has just embarked on a tour that is said to bring
together the worlds of film, art installation, theatre performance, animation and live concert. 37

The recording artist prefigures the contemporary artist in many ways. Since the

introduction of multi-tracking technology, pop and rock musicians rapidly became increasingly
artistic in their presentation and vision, and have aligned themselves closely with trends in the
fine art world, often greatly influencing contemporary art. Contemporary artists catering to a
shrinking audience of art critics, artists, and the social elite now find themselves increasingly
incorporating elements of movement and sound into their exhibitions, while more
unapologetically selling their brand or concept beside their individual artworks. Today the
successful contemporary artist may often be more accurately described as a producer, director, or
curator than a painter or sculptor. Similarly, the successful recording artist is often pushed
beyond singing and playing an instrument to become a marketer, music video director, or fashion
designer, adapting their personal aesthetic to the creative task at hand. Historically, the
distinctions between types of visual arts have been rigidly culturally defined: painter, sculptor,
photographer, printmaker, etc. These categories are overlaid with thousands of years of
associations and rules, written and unwritten. By contrast, the audio artist (one person capable of
overlaying layers of audio information in a recorded, fixed form) has only existed for a hundred
years, while multi-tracking technology has only existed for fifty years. In that brief time the

37

"Jnsi Concerts." Jnsi - Official Site. Web. 19 Apr. 2010. <http://jonsi.com/concerts>.

album has provided a centerpiece for the recording artist to build a brand and creative vision
around, creating an enormous boom in the sale and distribution of popular music, as well as an
explosion of the cultural influence of music and musicians.

For better or worse, barriers are being redefined as education, technology, and

occasionally fame and money allow modern fine artists and recording artists the resources to
move more freely between mediums.38 This has become not a luxury but a necessity for fine
artists attempting to compete economically and creatively for an audience accustomed to
interactive video games, 3D televisions, and unlimited access to videos. In this new kind of
hyper-sensory artistic world, for both contemporary artists and recording artists, mediums are
ephemeral; concepts are king.

38

Heartney, Eleanor. Art & Today. London: Phaidon, 2008. Print.

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