Recap: It’s Only Rock and Art, but They Like It -Yazzy's Williamverdult.com

According to Dorothy Spears of the New York Times, the strobe lights flicker hypnotically and the dancers move robotically when the haunting face of the chanteuse Nico appears in “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” the 1966 road show of art, music and film organized by Andy Warhol. Mr. Reed may have been among the first rock ’n’ roll stars to embrace art and film as inspiration. But he is certainly not the last, as “Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967,” a highly anticipated exhibition opening this weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, clearly demonstrates.

While Ms. Anderson’s career was flourishing, David Byrne was ricocheting from painting to photography to video to conceptual art, first at the Rhode Island School of Design and then at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Abandoning art school, he moved to New York in 1972.

Attracted to punk rock’s disregard for virtuosity, artists waiting for their big break in galleries began taking up musical instruments in the 1970s. “So many artists played in bands,” said Robert Longo, who in 1977 formed one called Menthol Wars with his fellow artist Richard Prince. “It was amazing to hear music that sounded how your art looked.”

“Everybody working in the underground Lower Manhattan music scene was coming out of some sort of art school,” Mr. Ranaldo recalled in an interview from London, where Sonic Youth was touring. “There were visual art students, theater arts students, filmmaking students. New wave and postpunk bands proved fertile ground for Mr. Longo. (The band’s “Contort Yourself” from 1979 is featured on the show’s playlist.)

In his Lower East Side studio, the video artist Mr. Oursler talked about rock ’n’ roll’s dismantling of what had once been an ivory-tower art world: “There was this idea pioneered by David Byrne and Laurie Anderson, that an artwork could be anything: a piece of sound, a movie, a piece of music or a videotaped installation.”

Isolated counterparts to New York’s art-rock scene emerged, beginning in the late 1960s. While still at Cal Arts, Mr. Kelley formed yet another band, the Poetics, with Mr. Oursler. “A lot of artists playing music stopped,” Ms. Gordon said. As Mr. Ranaldo recalled the time: “Art started making a lot of money. “Summer of Love,” which recently closed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, looked back to the art and music of 1967; “Panic Attack! “I think museums and galleries are hungry for young bodies,” said Mr. Ranaldo, adding that a show of Sonic Youth’s many collaborations with artists will tour Europe next summer. It’s a much more immediate calling card than art.”

Mr. Reed said he saw a renaissance of interest in combining art with music.

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