In 1987,
Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s "Art into Pop" questioned the rise of British
Post-War popular music within the context of art schools, employing cross-terms
such as “rock bohemians” and “pop situationists”. The authors focused on the
1970s and the aftermath of punk, finding a close relation between popular music
forms and art forms in the contexts of several British cities as well as in New
York City. More recently, Simon Reynolds traced the genealogy of an “artistic
bias” in popular music back to the post-punk period of the late 1970s, when
“art ideas affected actual musical practices” (2009: 365) due to the influence
of not musically trained artists coming from the NYC experimental scene such as
Yoko Ono and Brian Eno.
So far,
scholarly investigations on the intersections between popular music and culture
and avant-garde arts have been mostly limited to the social cultural milieu of
only two decades (1960s/1970s) and two countries (U.S.A./U.K.). Essay such as
Bernard Gendron’s "Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club" (2002) and Sytze
Seenstra’s "We are the noise between the stations" (2003) constitute two notable
exceptions through their reframing of the American punk scene and of David
Byrne’s work through a diachronical comparison with French modernism and
conceptual romanticism, respectively. They do not only reassess the collapse of
hierarchical distinction between the social function played by high arts and
mass culture with the advent of late modernity/postmodernity, but also take
into serious consideration the relationships between different media domains.
