Art of Modern Rock

Description

The Art of Modern Rock is set to be the first and last word on today's concert posters and promotional art, featuring over 1500 exemplary rock posters from over 200 international studios and artists. A massive 492-page book, this long-anticipated sequel to the Art of Rock - considered the bible of rock poster art of the Boomer generation - is the must-have book for music and poster fans of all kinds. Featuring plenty of work from the top names in the industry (Glen Barr, Art Chantry, Coop, Emek, Hatch Show Print, Derek Hess, Jeff Kleinsmith, Frank Kozik, Lindsey Kuhn, Scrojo, Jamie Ward), as well as small and emerging studios from around the world, The Art of Modern Rock is approximately fifteen times the size of its nearest competition. The only survey to gather the best of the dynamic world of rock poster design, The Art of Modern Rock is a bona fide publishing event.

Paul Grushkin is the author of the best-selling The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk and an acknowledged expert in rock merchandise. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dennis King is a premier collector and dealer of rock posters and memorabilia. He lives in Berkeley, California. Wayne Coyne is the lead singer and primary video director and poster artist for the Grammy-nominated band the Flaming Lips. He lives in Oklahoma.

If MTV is any indication, the face of rock'n'roll needs plastic surgery. Sure, Britney's got a hot belly and Beyonce a glorious booty, but sex is this close to selling itself out. Soon, people will be demanding money shots in their milk commercials. Where's an intelligent consumer to find imagery that both tickles the brain and plugs one into popular culture? Try Paul Grushkin and Dennis King's Art of Modern Rock, which showcases in full color more than 1600 rock posters and flyers by some 200 international artists, from veterans like Frank Kozik to up-and-comers a la Leia Bell. More than a sequel to Art of Rock (Abbeville, 1987) Grushkin's best-selling survey of psychedelic posters from the 1960s and 1970s this is the definitive document of a tens-of-thousands-strong countercultural revolution that began in the late 1980s with the grunge movement and continues today from New York City to San Francisco to...Des Moines and Denton, TX? "Wherever there's a 'kid' a teenager, a twentysomething, or even a thirtysomething who is on the cutting edge of music there's someone cranking out posters," Grushkin asserts. In fact, more rock posters have been made in the last ten years than in the history of rock'n'roll. To hear Grushkin tell it, this explosion has to do with how today's teenagers access music, i.e., without seeing great LP art, as Grushkin did in his youth, and, increasingly, without walking into a music store. With MP3 looming large, "the art that always defined your relationship to the music" is disappearing. In the spirit of the hippies, punks, and alternative rockers before them, young music fans have been filling the void themselves. Via the Internet, these kids track their favorite bands as they tour and call up promoters about doing posters for shows. While some may go digital, many still rely on the old-school (read: cheap) silk-screen method, which King-who holds one of the largest rock poster collections in the world-credits with starting the poster revolution. "It's almost political: all these people realizing that they have the power to create and disseminate their own imagery," he says. The insane eclecticism of the featured artists called for a thematic organization; readers will witness the many incarnations of that rock poster staple, the devil, for instance. Heightening the effect is King's clever layout, which mimics both a gallery wall and a web site. The final product is a pastel-cum-Day-Glo gem that will make music fans into art fans and vice versa. -Library Journal, Editor's Pick Concert posters, as any rockologist will tell you, are the Van Goghs and Matisses of the music scene. And in 1987, author Paul Grushkin cobbled together an encyclopedia of the genre's best in an eight-pound hernia of a book called "The Art of Rock." In the 17 years since, the rise of graphic-art technology, digital music and local indie-rock scenes has sparked a second wave of eye-popping posters. So Grushkin and collector Dennis King teamed up for a sequel. "When you've got the Bible," says Grushkin, "there's gotta be a New Testament, right?" Hence, "The Art of Modern Rock": an exhilarating volume of 1,800 posters from grass-roots artists hyping local shows by bands like the Beastie Boys, the Flaming Lips and many more no one's heard of. Like its older sibling, it flat-out rocks. -Teen Newsweek