The Album Art Music Left Behind

Installation view of Art of Noise (photo Thomas Barratt, courtesy Cooper Hewitt)

It is a cold afternoon in New York when collector and photography critic Vince Aletti says, “I miss all that material. Not that I could house it anymore.” The material in question: album covers, flyers, zines, and posters from the 1970s disco scene he chronicled so meticulously, once held in hands and housed in homes. They float ephemerally on the corner of a screen behind Aletti, who is participating in a panel moderated by Matthew Higgs and hosted at the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design, where three levels above us is the Art of Noise exhibition. An attendee asks the speakers if any album covers have influenced how the corresponding music sounds to their ears. Higgs cites the oft-quoted anecdote that Peter Saville did not listen to Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (1979) before designing the iconic cover.

It’s now hard to imagine the music without the artwork, yet they were never truly connected in the first place.

Saville’s Unknown Pleasures is one of the many album covers featured in Art of Noise, originating at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition showcases the design of both audio products and graphics, exploring how these visual elements influence the way we perceive music. In the visual portion, the album cover of Unknown Pleasures, depicting an inverse pulse of the first neutron star recorded, stands among other giants: Josef Müller-Brockmann’s 1955 Swiss-style Beethoven concert poster, Milton Glaser’s 1967 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits cover, Takenobu Igarashi’s architectural posters for Tokyo’s Summer Jazz Festival in the ’70s and ’80s.

And then there are the smaller, but explosive bits of ephemera like flyers and zines. A flash of purple Xeroxed over a Paradise Garage invitation catches my eye. As I walk past, I think of how amusing it is to look at these through a glass case. I am delighted at their elevation to museum art-object status, in the former home of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie no less, but feel compelled to consider their disappearance from their everyday physical environment. To walk through the exhibition is to experience a forcefield of decades past, to hear music that’s not playing.

Peter Saville, "Joy Division" (1979), cover for Unknown Pleasures album (image courtesy Cooper Hewitt)

A section dedicated to Reid Miles’s starkly modernist work for Blue Note Records in the 1950s and ’60s offers a playful, monochromatic amalgamation of shapes, his artwork balancing tone in the way Eric Dolphy’s sax trapezes up and down a scale. The cover for Jackie McLean's 1965 It’s Time steals attention with the humble exclamation mark, over 200 of them. Like Saville, Miles didn’t listen to the music, despite how synonymous his typography and photographic compositions have become with jazz itself. Perhaps unlike Saville, he did work with session notes from producer Alfred Lion to inform his designs. Niklaus Troxler, whose posters for the Willisau Jazz Festival in Switzerland claim a different section, did nothing but immerse himself in the jazz scene, to the extent that he both organized and designed for the festival. His work is typographic and abstract, mirroring Miles’s designs on an occasionally larger scale. In interviews about his work, he has spoken of the intertwined nature of jazz and design, though for the most part, these common threads run through the arts: balance, symmetry, proportion, and rhythm. Despite opposite approaches, Miles’s and Troxler’s formal results converge.

Artist Raymond Pettibon’s covers are nowhere to be seen in Art of Noise, but he would not be out of place among the featured designers. Despite having listened to punk and even briefly played for his brother’s band, Pettibon is ambivalent about the connection between his imagery and the early Southern California punk scene. The art came before the music, in his case, and one can assume too much has been made about their relationship for his taste. His work is more than that, so I quiet the noise while reading his newly released monograph of album covers, titled Nervous Breakdown: Raymond Pettibon (2026). Published by David Zwirner Books in conjunction with an exhibition at Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany, its cover bears his familiar drawing for Sonic Youth’s Goo (1990) plastered across a red background.

Cover of Nervous Breakdown: Raymond Pettibon (David Zwirner Books/Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, 2026) (photo Madison Carroll, courtesy David Zwirner Books)

In one of the four essays that precede images of the art, critic Ulrich Loock underscores that, while the drawing for Goo was selected from existing work and not created for the music, Pettibon did make a few alterations. In the end, Loock writes, “the connection of the graphics to Black Flag's music remains unclear.” The music is blatant, ultimately ironclad in its belief, whereas Pettibon skirts, referentially, juxtaposing image and text in a way that compels multiple looks. The title of Loock’s essay is “Raymond Pettibon's Delayed Entry into the Art World,” in reference to the artist’s frequently stated belief that his work in album covers set him back 10 years, although he doesn’t seem to have a particular affinity for the art world, either.

What the book reveals most clearly is that Pettibon's oeuvre has always been about more than punk, more than the black-and-white pop aesthetic of squandered scenes. A 2003 record for Foo Fighters’s Times Like These shows a splatter of red, amoeba-like splotches of dried paint, and while it retains a chaotic sensibility, it is far from the precise and bold linework of early punk. This style surfaces again in Thomas Fehlmann’s Low Flow (2004), with the same splatters in blue, and in Hifiklub’s I Mean Alarmed (2021), with violent streaks of orange and red fashioned as fire. In 2016, Pettibon created a cover for Body/Head’s No Waves album, depicting an uncharacteristically calm beach scene. Still, a dark gloom penetrates the sky, his identifiable scrawl above. For Lana Del Rey’s 2019 album Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Pettibon softened himself down to a mere echo. Fine blue brushstrokes sketch over an overwhelmingly neutral background.

Spread with Pettibon's Foo Fighters cover designs from Nervous Breakdown: Raymond Pettibon (David Zwirner Books/Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, 2026) (photo Madison Carroll, courtesy David Zwirner Books)

Kim Gordon, one-half of Body/Head, former member of Sonic Youth, and longtime friend of Pettibon's, wrote about the artist in a 1985 Artforum essay, republished in this book. "Wandering outside the realm of the art world and attached to a music subculture, Pettibon can depict a wider range of subject matter than is considered appropriate or even possible within the avant-garde of the art world, because of the inhibiting values that prevail in that system,” Gordon writes. For fans of Pettibon, this book will not disappoint in its ability to fully absorb his range. It is an extensive catalog, expansive in the same way that Art of Noise is, in an attempt to encapsulate range and prioritize breadth over depth.

It is true that even in the absence of noise, the art exists in its own right, as material and as ephemera from a bygone era for Vince Aletti to miss. And whether the visual record reflects its auditory companion is often a matter of perspective, a connection we seek to mythologize because we cannot imagine one without the other.

The Art of Noise continues at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (2 East 91st Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through August 16. The exhibition was organized by Joseph Becker, curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA, with Cynthia Trope, associate curator of Product Design and Decorative Arts at Cooper Hewitt.

Nervous Breakdown: Raymond Pettibon (2026) is published by David Zwirner Books and the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, and is available online and through independent booksellers.