Everything about the fleeting post-punk project ART was conceived as an angry provocation or some sort of a put-on. Indeed, everything about ART really reeked of the Sixties, up to and including their appropriation of the “Yippies” in one of their song titles, but that wasn’t even really a song. Somewhat like The Normal, they put out but a single 7-inch but also contributed two entries to the 1983 compilation The “You’ll Hate This Record” Record that also featured two tracks from G.G. Allin. Apparently they also produced a live cassette called ART: Live at Carnegie Hall, but there’s very little information about that one, you can find it on eBay and Gemm.com occasionally.

In his review of Public Image Ltd’s September 26, 1982, show at New York’s Roseland Ballroom (which is likely to close in April), Robert Christgau drew attention to the first band on the bill: “The opener was Art, which bills itself as ‘the only band in the world.’ PIL isn’t arguing. Laurie Montana, who mimes Art’s songs for the hearing-impaired, is a known associate of Keith Levine.” Believe me, this band was totally made to open for PiL. If they hadn’t existed, John Lydon would have had to invent them.

The bulk of their output consists of the three or four tracks, depending on how you count them, on their 1980 7-inch The Only Record in the World. Consistent with their aggravating ways, side A was pretty much normal, featuring a single “song” called “Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos.” Side B was wiggier, divided into two completely separate left and right channels. The left channel offered “Give Me Nuclear Power” and “I Don’t Want to Hold Your Hand,” and if you played the right channel only, you would hear “ART Gets Thrown Off the Stage While Playing for the Yippies.” As if to pre-empt listener annoyance at being forced to fiddle with the balance knob (remember that thing?) to enjoy the music, ART typically added the following text to the instructions on the back cover: “Hard? One must make sacrifices for ART.”

Speaking of that back cover, it featured one of the shorter artistic manifestos in human history—it went like this:
 

THE ART MANIFESTO

White people can do things, too. The difference between an object of beauty itself and a simple arranger of beauty is the difference between a flower and a florist. The creative combination of chemicals into something useful and healthy as opposed to a simple distributor of those chemicals is the difference between a drug and a druggist. We are not artists. We’re ART.

All of the aforementioned songs except the Yippie one are long, convoluted, exasperating, and not without musical merit. However, far louder than any musical note is the sheer obnoxiousness of attitude. Every nanosecond is dripping with contempt for the audience and impatience with anyone who might interfere with ART’s right to express themselves in any way they pleased. Or maybe not—was it all ironic? A put-on? Yes/no. Both/and.

The A side, “Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos,” featured some spoken agitprop/dada verses by a female vocalist, which are periodically interrupted by a male voice shouting “NO!”—it eventually resolves into something resembling a groove, with the chorus “We’re all boat people!” “I Don’t Want to Hold Your Hand,” which apparently boasts the (unprinted) parenthetical addition “(I Just Want to Beat You Up),” is all over the map but takes the time to poke fun at a bunch of songs that had recently been popular, including M’s “Pop Muzik,” the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass”—I may have missed some. The crime that these acts committed, it seems, was to be excessively interested in being popular.
 

The Only Record in the World, back cover

The main guy in ART was a fellow named Mykel Board, whose bio (see the YouTube pages linked below) is littered with phrases like “Yippie,” “1968 Democratic National Convention,” and “anarchist newspaper.” He recently published a memoir about Mongolia called Even a Daughter Is Better Than Nothing, the title of which (he explains) is a Mongolian expression that means, roughly, “half a loaf is better than none” and was explicitly chosen to be attention-getting.

The music couldn’t be more of its time, or actually ten years earlier, but it’s amusing and not altogether horrible to listen to. For those whose curiosity about ART is insatiable, there’s some more stuff (in German, alas) on this website, but also images of all the album art and liner notes, and that stuff is all in English, obviously.

I doubt that you’ll hear back, but according to the back cover of The Only Record in the World if you want you can write the good people of ART a letter at One Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10001.

“Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos”

 
“Give Me Nuclear Power/I Don’t Want To Hold Your Hand”

 
“ART Gets Thrown Off The Stage While Playing For The Yippies”

Previously on Dangerous Minds: