Johan Kugelberg has more than 30 years of experience in the U.S. entertainment and art industries. From 1990 to 1994, he was the General Manager for Atlantic Records subsidiary Matador Records and a marketing and A&R executive for Def American Records from 1994 to 1997. He was the curator of the punk/rock sale at Christie’s in 2008, the first major auction sale devoted to punk. In addition, he has served as a curator and consultant in pop culture fields for auction houses including Christie’s and Phillips de Pury.
As an archivist, he has created comprehensive collections in the fields of punk, hip hop, and counterculture, focusing on printed works, ephemera, photography, and book arts. Currently, he is the owner and curator of Boo-Hooray, an archival processing company and project space in Manhattan.
Over his career Johan has curated more than 100 exhibits and written 42 published books. His book on the early history of hip hop was nominated for the NYPL Books for the Teen Age award 2008, and his book on the Velvet Underground won the Foreword silver medal for music 2010. Beauty Is in the Street was nominated for the London Design Museum 2012 Designs of the Year Awards.
Johan has lectured and taught at Yale, Cornell, University of Wisconsin, Emory, UVA, Pace, Concordia University Montreal, Ohio State and MOMA PS1.
Kugelberg’s works have featured at Financial Times, New York Times, The New York Post, London Times, The Independent, The Creative Review, Rolling Stone, Dazed & Confused, Paris Match, and The Guardian.
Johan Kugelberg, ABD müzik ve sanat endüstrilerinde 30 yıldan fazla deneyime sahiptir. 1990’dan 1994’e kadar Ahmet Ertegün’ün kurmuş olduğu Atlantic Records’a bağlı kuruluş Matador Records’un Genel Müdürlüğünü yapmıştır.
2008’de Christie’s’deki ilk punk/rock müzayedesinin küratörlüğünü yapmıştır. Bir arşivci olarak punk, hip hop ve karşı kültür alanlarında basılı eserler, efemera, fotoğraf ve kitap sanatlarına odaklanan kapsamlı koleksiyonlar yaratmaya devam etmektedir. Halen, New York merkezli arşiv ve proje alanı olan Boo-Hooray’ın kurucusu ve küratörüdür.
Kugelberg, kariyeri boyunca 100’den fazla serginin küratörlüğünü yapmış ve 42 kitap yayınlamıştır. Hip-hop’un erken tarihi üzerine yazdığı kitabı 2008 NYPL Books for Teen Age ödülüne aday gösterilmiş ve Velvet Underground hakkındaki kitabı 2010 müzik dalında Foreword Gümüş Madalyası’nı kazanmıştır. Yale, Cornell, VVisconsin Üniversitesi, Emory, UVA, Pace, Concordia Üniversitesi Montreal, Ohio Üniversitesi ve MOMA PS1 gibi önemli eğitim kurumlarında ders vermiştir.
Johan Kugelberg’in çalışmaları Financial Times, New York Times, The New York Post, London Times, The Independent, The Creative Revievv, Rolling Stone, Dazed & Confused, Paris Match, Nouvelle Observateur, The Guardian gibi yayınlarda yer almıştır.
21st Century Book Collecting and Archiving
Johan Kugelberg
As time continues to munch on us like so many sesame bread sticks, the collecting habits of the younger generation affect the dealer habits of the older. It is always difficult to identify value and worth and historical/cultural significance in the tempora and mores that you yourself were a part of, or aware of, or ignorant of, as they co-existed with your particular inability to step twice into the same stream. As you are stepping in, other waters are ever flowing past you, and the ephemera of your time are as ephemeral. You were an accomplice in throwing stuff away, hence making the stuff ephemeral, or for that matter, an accomplice in making certain books of your time rare as you weren’t buying them.
For my generation of collectors (born in the sixties/seventies), the vigor, humors, and passions of the years surrounding our very birth become infused with potency. We feel our skills as players of knock-out ping-pong with Chronos, Ananke, and Mister Kairos is dependent on our ability to recognize and acknowledge significant artifacts of the times and days we are living through, even if we were in diapers at the time. Having just missed out on something due to date of birth, place of birth, or socio-economical-cultural-educational surroundings sure brings added MSG to the consumption of cultural goods.
My generation is able to disperse with the usual stratifications of hi- and lo-brow, driving previous generations nuts as their hard-earned accumulated knowledge was nulled and voided during the second half of the 20th century by a new and financially improved great unwashed, namely their very own sons and daughters. What the greatest generation accomplished (and how they de facto saved our collective asses) was busy-bodily taken for granted by the boomers, whose rhetoric laid claims that what they were building was a new society that was an alternative to the old. With 20/20-hindsight one can pop one’s monocle yelling “Hooey!” as we remember Mark Williams’ words in A Day In The Life:
There was never an alternative society, was there? Because if there was, there would have to be an alternative currency, and alternative property laws and so on. The alternative society was a misnomer: there was an alternative culture, but there was never an alternative society.
Some of us spend a lot of time sifting through the cultural residue of all the frantic activity of the second half of the 20th century. When I first saw punk ephemera at the ABAA Antiquarian Book Show a few years back, I remember thinking that someone was trying to finish sewing up an ermine fur by incorporating some alley cat, but by the time the second thought came around I was going “Great! About time!” It actually fit in pretty well; as Punk started happening-what-45-odd years ago, the timeline of the commencing of commerce certainly coincides not-at-all by coincidence with the similar span in time from the cultural eruption of Dada/Surrealism or, The Beats, or Japanese post-war photography books. Afterwards, the game is on to hardcore selling & collecting & exhibiting and all that…
LÖPÇÜK 