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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Skye Sherwin

Album covers: are they art?

Guide albums gallery: Arcade Fire
Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
The image calls to mind David Hockney’s muted Californian cool, though this album with multiple versions of its cover, reproduced in negative with colours ranging from lime to deep pink, is more in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s screenprints.
Photograph: PR
Guide albums gallery: Christina Aguilera
Christina Aguilera – Bionic
Christina as modernist magpie. Here she’s fused the robotic woman from Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi classic Metropolis with Dalí’s Mae West lips sofa.
Photograph: PR
Guide albums gallery: Klaxons
Klaxons – Surfing The Void
While this could have been knocked up in somebody’s lunchtime, the photoshopped image of Klaxons frontman Jamie Reynolds’s moggy happens to skewer two recent art trends: taxidermy and minimalism-meets-black metal (as seen in their flag).
Photograph: PR
Guide albums gallery: Nicki Minaj
Nicki Minaj – Pink Friday
A macabre retort to Dave LaChapelle’s vacuous fashion-meets-pop art photography, this is closer to Allen Jones’s fetish doll furniture sculptures mixed with the sickly aesthetic of that pink crying Pierrot poster from the 1980s.
Photograph: PR
Guide albums gallery: No Age
No Age – Everything Inbetween
Created by the LA art world’s go-to book designer Brian Roettinger, this is like a west coast punk take on Barbara Kruger’s slogans or Ed Ruscha’s text painting. That’s one screwed-up bit of paper.
Photograph: PR
Guide albums gallery: Sufjan Stevens
Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz
This looks like a propaganda poster for a dictatorial regime from a fantastical alternative early 20th century. It’s actually by the Louisiana-based outsider artist Royal Robertson, a schizophrenic whose work fixated on biblical apocalypse and aliens.
Photograph: PR
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