The 10 Best Art and Music Collaborations of All Time

Image via Complex Original

As a pioneer of the American punk and new wave scenes of the 1970s and '80s, it was up to Blondie, led by Debbie Harry, to bring international attention to the street artists with whom she was coming up alongside in New York City. For the video for "Rapture," her 1981 funk/rock/jazz/rap-inspired hit, graffiti artists Lee Quiñones and Jean-Michel Basquiat feature prominently in the background—they created the set around her. Though Quiñones was part of the scenery plan from the get-go, Basquiat was brought in at the last minute when Grandmaster Flash failed to show for the shoot.

Before she was going head to head with Jay Z, performance artist Marina Abramović was exploring matters of life and death with Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons, a musician/composer whose work is not easily categorized. In 2011, the two collaborated on a staged performance of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović at the Manchester International Festival, which featured Abramović, Willem Dafoe, and Hegarty as musical director. The performance art biography has since been re-staged throughout the world, from Amsterdam to Antwerp. Most recently, it was staged in New York's Park Avenue Armory.

The one-of-a-kind Birkin bag he had George Condo paint for Kim Kardashian aside, Kanye West has a pretty impressive track record of artistic collaborations. In 2007, West commissioned superflat artist Takashi Murakami to create the anime-inspired cover art for West's Graduation album. Yeezy must have liked what he saw because he also hired the artist to direct the video for "Good Morning," the opening track from the same album.

Long before ARTPOP or meat dresses were even a twinkle in Gaga's eyes, Björk and her baby daddy, artist Matthew Barney, were sharing their talents—and some screen time—in Drawing Restraint 9, a feature-length video art installation that uses drawings, photographs, sculptures, and, of course, moving images to follow a fictional whaling vessel from the Sea of Japan to Antarctica. Barney and Björk star in the project, which ended up with a small theatrical release in 2006 courtesy of IFC Films, with the Icelandic superstar providing the soundtrack.

How Basquiat came to design the cover for Rammellzee and K-Rob's 1983 single "Beat Bop" is kind of a funny story. It all began when Rammellzee, a rapper and graffiti artist in his own right, called Basquiat a "fraud," to which Basquiat responded that he could "out-paint, out-dance, and out-rap anybody." The gauntlet had been thrown, but the act itself seemed to help quell the boiling rivalry between the two with Basquiat eventually designing the "Beat Bop" cover. (Though his misspelling of Rammellzee's name—he was short one "L"—led many to believe that this was one rap battle where Basquiat was the victor).

Grace Jones' 1986 song, "I'm Not Perfect (But I'm Perfect for You)" is a forgettable little tune, but the video is fascinating for even the most casual art fan. In addition to a cameo by Andy Warhol (who states simply that "Grace is perfect"), it showcases the making (and final reveal) of a 60-foot-long black and white skirt, created by Keith Haring, who appears throughout the video's near four-minute run.

It's good to have friends when you're an artist, particularly friends who are also talented artists with whom you can collaborate on occasion, which is exactly the situation British artist/writer Stanley Donwood found himself in with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Friends since their art student days at the University of Exeter, when Yorke and co. were in need of cover art for their second album, The Bends, he called on his old buddy. The final result—the image of a video-manipulated CPR dummy—was instantly iconic, and Donwood has continued to work with the band (and Yorke on solo projects) ever since.

To call Parade, a 1917 ballet performed by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, a simple collaboration between Pablo Picasso and French composer Erik Satie would be to misunderstand the point completely. The artistry for this scandalous production ran deep, and also included choreography by Léonide Massine and a script by Jean Cocteau, who told the story of a trio of circus artists attempting to lure an audience to their performance. The final piece was a bit of a clusterfuck, with Cocteau's addition of foghorns, typewriters, and other noisy props drowning out much of Satie's composition. And then there were Picasso's cubist costumes, many of them made from cardboard, which proved problematic for the actors when they wanted to, well, move.

The creative coupling of surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and American rocker Alice Cooper just may be one of the strangest in the history of artist-meets-musician collaborations, which is exactly what makes it one of the most exciting. The mutual fans met up in 1973, upon which the artist gifted Cooper with a plaster brain sculpture covered in chocolate and ants. How could Cooper resist when Dalí suggested that they spend the next several weeks together creating a three-dimensional piece with Cooper as its subject? From their (literal) brainstorming came the now-famous First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram of Alice Cooper's Brain, a five-and-a-half-foot hologram portrait in which Cooper is biting the head off of Venus de Milo.

Having created cover art for a variety of artists—including The Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin—the fact that Andy Warhol would contribute work to The Velvet Underground & Nico's self-titled debut album isn't surprising. What is of interest, however, is that in the mid-1960s, the legendary pop artist actually became the band's manager, resulting in The Velvet Underground's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" endeavor, a series of shows where the band played with projections of Warhol's films in the background—a unique (at the time) melding of art forms that paved the way for the many other duos mentioned on this list.