A detail from the cover of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation
Gerhard Richter's photo-painting Kerze (Candle) is being put up for auction by Sotheby's next week, with a guide price of £2.5m. That is thought to be a conservative figure, given the special interest in Richter's work. If you're none the wiser, it might be more helpful to point out it's also the cover art to Sonic Youth's 1988 classic Daydream Nation.
Of course, Sonic Youth were hardly setting a precedent by appropriating a work of art for their cover. Peter Saville famously used a painting by Henri Fantin-Latour as the artwork for New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies. Interviewing him about his work 20-odd years later, a sniffly Saville - still in his dressing gown at four in the afternoon - provided me with the most succinct summary of postmodernism I've heard: "Everything was about being modern and minimal," he said. "I wanted to do the opposite, so I took something old and romantic and stuck it on the cover."
Other attempts have been less successful. When Suede's Greatest Hits was being compiled, the band wanted to use Wolfgang Tillmans' Man Pissing on Chair. Tillmans, however, refused as the band intended to crop the image to make it fit. (Well, and edit out the pissing.)
It's a moot point whether artworks appropriated in this way are artificially raised in value, or suffer from association. Which are your favourite and worst examples of record cover paintings?
