OXFORD, United Kingdom — Radiohead, the 30 million records-selling, culturally iconic, yada yada English rock band, needs no introduction — though the hagiographic press release of This Is What You Get, an exhibition about the extensive artistic output accompanying their music career at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, takes pains to do so anyway. Stanley Donwood, however, does need some introducing. Over 30 years, the artist worked closely in collaboration with frontman Thom Yorke as the latter made his music. Sketches, collages, and notebooks on display detail an ongoing visual dialogue between the pair, and chart how the look and feel of album covers took shape before being presented to the record-buying public. Fans will surely salivate over the opportunity to see these real-time working methods as much as the rare vinyls lining the introductory room walls, handwritten lyrics for “Karma Police” (1997), and the original album cover artworks themselves.
Indeed, the first room mentions Yorke and Donwood’s belief in the record shop as a “democratic gallery … a level of exposure that most contemporary artists can only dream of.” This actually gets to the crux of why the art — experimental collages employing detailed painting, brilliant color, and digital manipulation — feel so outlandish, touching upon a splatterplot of ideas as varied and obtuse as the album’s lyrics do: Contemporary artists do not get this automatic luxury of exposure. The art, despite the exhibition’s claims to freedom from commercial concerns — “[the covers were] always created as works of art, not simply commodities” — is by definition created as a visual vehicle for the music, rather than to its own end. Ergo, it will be sold, regardless of what it looks like.
Installation view of This Is What You Get
In this sense, Donwood and Yorke’s collaboration represents the utopian ideal of art-making: freedom from market demands. They epitomize play; taking lyrics as starting points, the two send sketches, scribbles, in-jokes, and references back and forth, thinking as imaginatively as possible — Christ drinking Pepsi or an astronaut in a field, for example — building on each other’s work organically. Of course, it is Radiohead’s hard-nosed business acumen and fierce protection of its interests, such as their labyrinthine accounting methods, that enable them such freedoms as releasing a “pay what you like” album, not to mention the creative liberty most artists don’t get. This ability to bend the norms extends to curating — Donwood and Yorke organized this show in collaboration with the Ashmolean; it is simply but methodically sectioned by album (except for 1993’s Pablo Honey — it appears they’d rather not highlight that one).
Radiohead formed in Oxford, which is presumably why they “developed” this show at the Ashmolean, though the connections mostly end there — unlike, say, an exhibition on Joy Division in Manchester, given how pivotal that group is to the history of cultural “Madchester” in the 1980s and ’90s. The timing of the show is more understandable, though — Radiohead just happened to announce their first new tour in seven years. The band’s marketing savvy, however, is now pitted against growing public outrage — the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement has called on fans to refuse to purchase tickets to the band’s concerts due to guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s recent performances in Tel Aviv as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza.
What will non-fans make of the artwork, which can be by turns playful, nihilistic, anti-commercial — all recurrent strains in Radiohead’s music? Again, it is the music — specifically the lyrics — that the visuals grow in tandem with; without it, one may look at the gloopy enamel swirl for Moon Shaped Pool’s (2016) cover “Wraith” (2015) and see, well, a context-less moon-shaped pool. Similarly, we are told that the King of Limbs’s (2011) artwork originates from a huge oak tree in the Savernake Forest in Wiltshire; yet there is a wealth of further meaning behind the accompanying pictures of densely packed and colorfully painted trees that a non-listener is lacking. The music and images exist as one half of the other, meaning those unfamiliar with the former automatically miss out to some degree. For the majority of visitors, however, this will be essential viewing alone just to see the original version of the album covers in person on the walls, like some kind of pilgrimage. With legions of fans behind them, this is art that has been given a free pass that many artists can only dream of.
Installation view of This Is What You Get
Installation view of Stanley Donwood, album art for OK Computer (1997)
Installation view of This Is What You Get
Installation view of This Is What You Get
Installation view of This Is What You Get
This Is What You Get continues at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (Beaumont Street, Oxford, United Kingdom), is curated by Lena Fritsch with Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke through January 11, 2026.