How Art Made Pop

From dada to Gaga and beyond, How Art Made Pop examines the intertwined histories of pop music and the visual arts from the late 1950s to the present day. Mike Roberts's remarkable and definitive study explores in detail the exhilarating exchange between art schools and the pop stars that they nurtured - or, occasionally, expelled.

The visual arts and attendant subcultural scenes have been at the root of every significant twist and turn in pop music is global history. An unprecedented expansion of art education in the late 1950s and early 1960s attracted a new wave of kids who would have normally headed into regular, blue-collar jobs. By attending art school these nascent stars gained access to a brave new world of romantic bohemianism and fanciful ideas about aesthetics, style and individualism. This informed and modified the kind of musicians that they became, and the kind of music that they became interested in. Where once these musicians would have considered themselves entertainers, they were now artists. And hence what they practised became an art form - not least because they said it was.

Through a writhing, hedonistic hurly burly of numerous artists and musicians - including, among many others, Marcel Duchamp, the Beatles, Yoko Ono, the Who, John Cage, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Gilbert & George, Kraftwerk, Richard Hamilton, Roxy Music, Patti Smith, Malcolm McLaren, Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Blondie, Factory Records, Jean Michel Basquiat, the KLF, Jeremy Deller, Riot grrrl and Jay Z - How Art Made Pop encompasses the worldwide history of art school rock, surveying popular trends and contextualising the practices of the many contemporary visual artists and artist-musicians still dazzled by pop's vital spark.

• ISBN 9781849761321