Celebrating a wide range of punk design in vinyl cover art, posters, flyers, fanzines, and other ephemera, The Art of Punk highlights the movement primarily within graphic design and print, while also considering its impact on wider popular culture. Punk was based on immediacy—an often-inspired amateurism and underground, close-knit communities that burned brightly but were not intended to extend beyond the gig, the event, the scene, the moment. Punk songs by such legendary bands as the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Damned, the New York Dolls, the Germs, and the Clash tended to be short, fast, and aggressive, and the oft-repeated credo “If it can’t be said in three minutes, it’s not worth saying” was adopted as standard practice, extending in turn to an entire ethos for the whole subculture. The book is arranged chronologically, and by genre, and features more than 900 visual examples both by uncredited artists and internationally renowned designers and design groups, alongside interviews with, and commentary by, many of the artists concerned.
Russ Bestley is a principal lecturer at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London. He coauthored and designed Up against the Wall: International Poster Design and Experimental Layout. Bestley’s PhD thesis in graphic design was titled Hitsville UK: Punk Rock and Graphic Design in the Faraway Towns, 1976–84.
Alex Ogg is an author and journalist whose books include The Hip Hop Years (accompanying the BAFTA-nominated TV series on which he acted as consultant), No More Heroes, and Independence Days. He has contributed to various publications, including The Times, Vive Le Rock, French art magazine Etapes International, Classic Rock, and award-winning website The Quietus. He is the former editor of Spiral Scratch and currently coeditor of the esteemed academic journal Punk & Post-Punk.
Vivien Goldman, a Londoner, has lived in Paris and now resides in New York City. Her can-do attitude and outernational insights have been on display in journalism, books, radio, television, university teaching, multimedia lecturing, museums, the recording studio, and the stage, ever since the punky reggae mid-1970s. A longtime adjunct professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recording Music, Tisch, her lecturing life has taken her to London, New York, Los Angeles, Munich, Bilbao, Lagos, and beyond. Goldman’s archive is collected at the Fales Library, NYU, as the Vivien Goldman Punk & Reggae Collection. Her vintage journalism can be found at rocksbackpages.com.
