- Breakfast in America won the 1980 Grammy Award for Best Recording Package, beating out albums by Talking Heads and Led Zeppelin, among others.
I was at my parents house over the weekend and spent a considerable amount of time listing vinyl albums on Amazon.com. It gave me cause to think about how much art has been removed from our lives since music has gone electronic. I remember lamenting that album cover art had been reduced to the size of a compact disc. Now with music confined to small files, any art is smaller than a postage stamp–a small icon on itunes.
On the plane ride home I noticed three or four Amazon Kindles in front of me. I started to think about how book cover art may be lost. This lead to Andy Warhol. and his bringing everyday objects into art and vice versa. I’m not sure he ever worked with book covers, but the yellow banana on the Velvet Underground cover is not something likely to be repeated in its impact anytime soon.
Sorting through the pile of vinyl albums, I came across what I think is perhaps the best example of cover art, Supertramp’s Breakfast in America. That can be argued for sure, but it can’t be argued that today Warhol would have a much more difficult time making art from everyday life just as artists today find it that more difficult to put art into it.
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