OXFORD, United Kingdom — Radiohead, the 30 million records-selling, culturally iconic, yada yada English rock band, wants no introduction — although the hagiographic press launch of This Is What You Get, an exhibition in regards to the in depth inventive output accompanying their music profession on the Ashmolean Museum of Artwork and Archaeology, takes pains to take action anyway. Stanley Donwood, nevertheless, does want some introducing. Over 30 years, the artist labored intently in collaboration with frontman Thom Yorke because the latter made his music. Sketches, collages, and notebooks on show element an ongoing visible dialogue between the pair, and chart how the feel and appear of album covers took form earlier than being offered to the record-buying public. Followers will certainly salivate over the chance to see these real-time working strategies as a lot because the uncommon vinyls lining the introductory room partitions, handwritten lyrics for “Karma Police” (1997), and the unique album cowl artworks themselves.
Certainly, the primary room mentions Yorke and Donwood’s perception within the document store as a “democratic gallery … a level of exposure that most contemporary artists can only dream of.” This truly will get to the crux of why the artwork — experimental collages using detailed portray, good coloration, and digital manipulation — really feel so outlandish, touching upon a splatterplot of concepts as diverse and obtuse because the album’s lyrics do: Up to date artists don’t get this computerized luxurious of publicity. The artwork, regardless of the exhibition’s claims to freedom from industrial issues — “[the covers were] always created as works of art, not simply commodities” — is by definition created as a visible automobile for the music, fairly than to its personal finish. Ergo, will probably be offered, no matter what it appears to be like like.
Set up view of This Is What You Get
On this sense, Donwood and Yorke’s collaboration represents the utopian ideally suited of art-making: freedom from market calls for. They epitomize play; taking lyrics as beginning factors, the 2 ship sketches, scribbles, in-jokes, and references forwards and backwards, considering as imaginatively as doable — Christ ingesting Pepsi or an astronaut in a subject, for instance — constructing on one another’s work organically. In fact, it’s Radiohead’s hard-nosed enterprise acumen and fierce safety of its pursuits, equivalent to their labyrinthine accounting strategies, that allow them such freedoms as releasing a “pay what you like” album, to not point out the inventive liberty most artists don’t get. This potential to bend the norms extends to curating — Donwood and Yorke organized this present in collaboration with the Ashmolean; it’s merely however methodically sectioned by album (aside from 1993’s Pablo Honey — it seems they’d fairly not spotlight that one).
Radiohead fashioned in Oxford, which is presumably why they “developed” this present on the Ashmolean, although the connections principally finish there — in contrast to, say, an exhibition on Pleasure Division in Manchester, given how pivotal that group is to the historical past of cultural “Madchester” within the Eighties and ’90s. The timing of the present is extra comprehensible, although — Radiohead simply occurred to announce their first new tour in seven years. The band’s advertising and marketing savvy, nevertheless, is now pitted in opposition to rising public outrage — the Boycott, Divest and Sanction motion has referred to as on followers to refuse to buy tickets to the band’s concert events resulting from guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s latest performances in Tel Aviv as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza.
What’s going to non-fans make of the art work, which might be by turns playful, nihilistic, anti-commercial — all recurrent strains in Radiohead’s music? Once more, it’s the music — particularly the lyrics — that the visuals develop in tandem with; with out it, one could take a look at the gloopy enamel swirl for Moon Formed Pool’s (2016) cowl “Wraith” (2015) and see, properly, a context-less moon-shaped pool. Equally, we’re advised that the King of Limbs’s (2011) art work originates from an enormous oak tree within the Savernake Forest in Wiltshire; but there’s a wealth of additional which means behind the accompanying footage of densely packed and colorfully painted bushes {that a} non-listener is missing. The music and pictures exist as one half of the opposite, which means these unfamiliar with the previous mechanically miss out to some extent. For almost all of tourists, nevertheless, this will likely be important viewing alone simply to see the unique model of the album covers in individual on the partitions, like some form of pilgrimage. With legions of followers behind them, that is artwork that has been given a free move that many artists can solely dream of.
Set up view of This Is What You Get
Set up view of Stanley Donwood, album artwork for OK Pc (1997)
Set up view of This Is What You Get
Set up view of This Is What You Get
Set up view of This Is What You Get
This Is What You Get continues on the Ashmolean Museum of Artwork and Archaeology (Beaumont Road, Oxford, United Kingdom), is curated by Lena Fritsch with Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke via January 11, 2026.
