"Sympathy for the Devil"

It’s rare for a museum show to demand or deserve multiple visits, but this much-anticipated exhibition delivers in a big way. No doubt I’ll have picked it to pieces by January with issues about who is or isn’t in it, or how some of the works in the show aren’t all that rock & roll, or how it should have been messier in premise, execution and installation, but this show demonstrates just how much these things will—and should—remain my problems. In the end, it acknowledges that curator Dominic Molon is a fan, and that’s the thing that has gone missing in the largely uninspired institutional curating of today.

This is a show best taken (like the music) personally, so I, for one, was most turned on by the inclusion of Peter Saville’s notes and designs for New Order’s Power, Corruption, and Lies (a record that changed my life), and Mark Leckey’s unparalleled take on style in his 1999 video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. This is largely because I’ve always had a thing for the Brits and the show’s interconnected geographic “zones” remind us how much location still matters.

The younger work here has a brief yet solid historical foundation—from Warhol’s Screen Tests of the Velvet Underground, to Richard Hamilton’s critical yet sympathetic take on Swinging London, to Pedro Bell’s LP cover art for Funkadelic, to Robert Longo’s pitch-perfect Men in the Cities drawings, to Raymond Pettibon’s transcendently punk drawings. As a fan, Molon did his homework and then some.