Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for January, 2023

Album Cover Hall of Fame’s News Update and Link Summary for January, 2023

Posted New Year’s Day, January 1, 2023 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Greetings to you all, and a Happy New Year 2023 to you and yours!

Hope that you all enjoyed your Holidays and have much to look forward to this upcoming year. While we were all involved with our celebratory efforts, efforts continued on several fronts to help determine everyone’s favorite album cover/packaging work of the past 12 months, with voting taking place in several name-brand competitions. The results of those contests will be released in ceremonies taking place in January and February and you can be sure that they’ll be highlighted here on the ACHOF site.

2023 will also be one of change here on the ACHOF site. As you know, for the past 10+ years, we’ve involved both our readers and our anonymous panel of experts in our own nominating/voting efforts in order to select people – i.e., the designers, photographers, art directors, etc. working in the music business and creating retail album packaging – for special honors, and while those efforts have produced lists of artists who’ve all built impressive portfolios of work in their respective areas, it has been an effort that – at least to me, this site’s principal – has distracted me from the main focus of the site, that being to give my readers in-depth interviews, information and ongoing coverage of the output of these talented individuals and design teams. With that said, I am announcing that, going forward, I’ll be working on creating a new site where the general, artist-specific info (bios, interviews and news) will go, with the “hall of fame”-related materials remaining on the albumcoverhalloffame.com site. More details on that effort will be announced soon, but I thought it important to share my intentions with you now with the hope that you’ll provide me with some feedback and suggestions as to how best to move forward.

Anyway, this month’s newsletter is a simple summary of the news in all of the main topic areas, with updates and info about several museum/gallery exhibitions, new auctions and sales results from previous ones and a large number of art and artist-related articles, so I’d like to once again say “thanks” for your help, your support and your patience while I work to get this site set on its new track in the long and short-term. Let’s get started with some updates on the award shows currently in progress:

Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for December, 2022

Posted December 1, 2022 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Greeting to you all – nice to see you all again!

Once again, I have to apologize for leaving you without an update for the month of November, but my wife and I decided to brave the travel scene to complete a vacation trip we’d started in late 2019 that had to be truncated a) by a death in the family and b) that crazy COVID-19 thing that shut things down a bit for a year or two. This journey, which took us to NYC and then over to the U.K. and Ireland, was quite restorative and, I must admit, was timed so that we’d be out of the country on November 8^th so we’d be able to have some distance between us and the pre-and-post-election media madness for a while. Of course, there was no escaping the news, but at least it was offset by all of the excitement that took place in the UK’s government while we were there, and we enjoyed the scenery/people/food there so much that it kept us in the right frame of mind, allowing us to return after a month with some degree of sanity and appreciation of life’s better things in tact.

Of course, during our travels we came across a number of album/music art-related things that added to the overall enjoyment of the experience, including a visit to the site of the new (set to open in its entirety in 2024) Universal Hip-Hop Museum in the Bronx Marketplace (NYC), with a tour provided by the museum’s director, Rocky Bucano; a visit to Liverpool, England (our first) that included an escorted overview provided by designer/author/all around great guy Andrew Dinely (of the Soft Octopus design studio there) that also included a stop at the British Music Experience – an “immersive exhibition” that takes attendees through an illustrated (via memorabilia, videos, etc.) review of the immense and diverse pop music scene in the U.K., from its beginnings in the 1950s through the most-recent BRIT Award-winning artists, and several other finds along the way (such as a memorial sculpture dedicated to the late Irish rock guitarist Rory Gallagher). I’ll be including brief articles about that as I unpack the info gathers and photos taken over the course of the next month or so.

Of course, while I was away, the first ACHOF Reader’s Poll took place, and the results of the voting will be shared a bit later in this newsletter. At the same time, another major album art-related poll – Art Vinyl’s Best Art Vinyl Awards – began gathering votes on its site (see more on this a little later as well) and the Recording Academy here in the U.S. released the names of the nominees for their upcoming Grammy Awards voting, with results to be announced early next year. Lots of great art and artistry on display, so it’ll be interesting to see how the voters/voting public responds to the announcements of the top vote-getters in all of these competitions.