COVER STORY

Oana Stănescu begins her book cover me softly, a companion to her curatorial début at the 2024 Beta Architecture Biennial in Timișoara, Romania, with Keith Richards. She argues that musical covers, as we know them today, are integral to the birth of rock’n’roll: in an act of admiration and cultural theft, Keith Richards took his famous band’s name from the Muddy Waters song “Rollin’ Stone,” and the Stones’ sound was largely adopted from the blues of Black southern guitarists. Whether you call it pillaging, flattery, imitation, or appropriation, this complicated ethical act of reinterpretation is the bedrock of the genre’s genesis. The cycle of covering proliferated with the Rolling Stones’ popularity; their 1965 hit “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” was covered over 20 times that same year. Some of these versions were arguably better than the original. “The way Otis Redding ended up doing it is probably closer to my original conception for the song,” Richards told Guitar World. “Our version was a demo for Otis.” Richards’ quote motions towards what cover me softly unravels over its 396 pages: covers are slippery things, and they are wont to upend our notions of originality, authorship, and ownership in art.

If the history of the artistic cover is a mountain of rocky sediment, then cover me softly is like the process of erosion, chipping away at the idea of covering to unveil its epic scope. Stănescu and her co-editor, Chase Galis, curated the book to be much like the biennial, applying the concept of a cover to as many artistic mediums as possible. The book unites essays on murky historical covers, like German surgeon Walther Hermann Ryff’s re-publication of the antique architectural treatise De architectura, with current thinking on disco and DJing, which comes in the form of an interview between artists Alyce Currier and Juliana Huxtable. The book gives you the gift of viewing almost every art form through the cover’s lens. “Whether with remixing songs or variations of a certain film, it’s always a different name, but in essence, it’s the same thing,” Stănescu told me.

At the biennial, every exhibit dealt with “covering” anew. In Under Covers by Karamuk Kuo, a communal bed in the biennial’s entryway sought to express the tactile, protective sense of being covered. Iwan Baan’s photographs of the Walker Guest House, which was made in 1953 in Florida but bisected and transported to California in 2020, depict a vastly different architectural reality than Ezra Stoller’s mid-century photographs of the same house in its original setting. The biennial itself was located mainly in Timișoara’s oldest building, the historic Garrison Command, which has maintained its structure since the early 18th century but has transformed from military housing to administrative offices to a venue for cultural events — another form of shapeshifting that fits the biennial’s theme.

Stănescu thinks of the cover in general as a “backdoor into something,” a chance to reevaluate how artistic labor is treated in our society. Cover me softly includes a patchwork of interviews and critical essays exploring how artistic fields like music, design, and fashion treat work that builds on preexisting work. The connective ties between artists and their fundamentally relational creative processes can yield immense benefits, like the book’s examples of successful democratized architecture in Europe, or fights for ownership in copyright lawsuits that bear fruit for artists. Stănescu and Galis think generous understandings of covering can circumvent hyper-individualism. The book relays that shifting our understanding of what belongs to us is practically and existentially pressing, and if we expand our language or “find backdoors,” as Stănescu says, we can have a stronger handle on the interconnectedness of all art. “How do we work with what’s already there? How do we think about the continuity of ideas, and not just constantly search for something new?” asked Galis.

Stănescu and Galis are pitching us something: a sweeping worldview where the artistic cover is neither good nor bad. They urge viewers and readers to remember that covers can come from fraught beginnings, and are not always bubbly and fun. “The origins of the cover in rock music were tied to racial conversations, in the United States particularly, and the world at large. It is also tied to power dynamics. If you look at fashion, especially in this climate, big retailers or designers can so easily copy or steal or cover younger, up-and-coming people with less resources,” Stănescu reiterated.

The center section of cover me softly is a celebration of iconic covers, although Stănescu left out what she told me was her personal childhood favorite: Nirvana’s cover of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World.” Examples from every era and field are arranged in a series of side-by-side images, reminding us of the ubiquity of covers. There is Yrjo Kukkapuro’s Lounge Chair (1978) reimagined as Something Fantastic’s Home Work Chair (2021); Sophia Le Fraga’s W8ING (2014), an iMessage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot using emojis and internet slang; there is Arial’s (debated) riff on Helvetica; Off-White’s redesign of the Air Jordan; and the Sistine Chapel mirrored in Caesar’s Palace. With a generous yet critical eye, cover me softly regards replicas and models, cover albums and movie adaptations as boundless arenas for creativity and chances to renew and uplift the past, ushering in a world where the old and new can coexist beyond the labels of original and copy.