Stylophone, puppets and musical secrets: we visited the David Bowie Museum in London
Costumes, private writings, remnants of aborted projects, and even a menu from a dinner shared with Iggy Pop in Berlin... Boasting 90,000 objects belonging to the "Space Oddity" singer, the David Bowie Centre opens in east London on September 13. Follow the guide.
At the David Bowie Centre, open from 13 September 2025. DAVID PARRY / V&A
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“I’m not a Warholian ,” said David Bowie. “Warhol borrows things from popular art and elevates them to high culture. I do the opposite: I borrow things from high culture and bring them down to street level.” “High culture” means, for example, Kabuki theater. German Expressionist cinema. Contemporary art, with the song “Joe the Lion,” an ode to the performer Chris Burden who, in April 1974 (two months after the release of the single “Rebel Rebel”), crucified himself on the hood of a sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle (a nail in each palm). But also Jean Genet, George Orwell, and William Burroughs, from whom he borrowed the cut-up technique (random cutting and pasting of words). A form of reasoned alienation or crucifixion of rock’n’roll, not to say a “Rock’n’Roll Suicide.” from the “top”.
In art, David Bowie was, in his own words, a " lower," unlike Warhol, who was a "raiser." But now, with the Bowie Centre in London, Bowie (like the 32 Campbell's soup cans dedicated by Warhol?) changes aesthetic category: attention, elevation,...
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