On a chilly afternoon in New York, collector and photography critic Vince Aletti reflects, “I miss all that material. Not that I could house it anymore.” He is referring to the album covers, flyers, zines, and posters that documented the 1970s disco scene with such care, objects once held in hand and kept in homes.
Now those artifacts appear only as faint images on a screen behind Aletti, who is taking part in a panel moderated by Matthew Higgs and presented at the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design. Three floors above the discussion sits the Art of Noise exhibition, linking the conversation to the broader history of graphic design and music culture.
During the panel, an audience member asks whether any album covers have affected how the speakers hear the music associated with them. In response, Higgs points to the widely repeated story that Peter Saville did not hear Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures (1979) before creating its now-iconic cover.
It is difficult today to separate the music from the artwork that came to define it, even though the two were never truly bound together in the first place.
