ABSTRACT
Just as contemporary art absorbs objects and cultural phenomena that are not yet art into its orbit, so too has rock and pop music become increasingly omnivorous at its definitional borders. Core to these analogous developments is the mythologization of the figure of the “band” as a creative agent and “world-maker.” Although a band might produce material artifacts and sensorial affects, its perceived existence is predicated upon a consensually recognized, although not uniformly projected, immaterial fiction somewhere in space and time. There are, at least hypothetically, an unlimited range of objects and concepts that a work of art or rock band might draw into its network of relations. Somehow, both a work of contemporary art and a band are capable of maintaining a sufficient degree of referential identity and unity, which, despite potential changes and evolutions, remain recognizably consistent across multiple material forms. The apparently permeable nature of these definitional boundaries brings us to analogize contemporary postconceptual art with the absorptive world-making capacity of bands, which we refer to as “bandness.”
