Where the flying monkeys at?

So Marx & Engels walk into a bar...

Infantilism is hot

Psycho killers, moi?

Majored in film and graphic design

Reportedly tamer

Thanks, girls

Do they think we don't notice?

Art schoooooool's out forever!

Our next song is named after the GPC manifesto

OMG! Harry Dean Stanton!

OK then

1. Pink Floyd
Syd Barrett attended Camberwell Art School in London while Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason studied architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic. (Roger first met Syd while attending Saturday art classes in high school.) Known for concept albums, intense on-stage light shows, instrumental freak-outs and the fact that Barrett went famously bonkers, Floyd remains the protoypical art school band.
The art of Syd Barrett

2. Gang of Four
For those into politico art, these University of Leeds art students started performing as a conceptual joke aimed at denouncing capitalism with overt political rhetoric ("To Hell With Poverty," "Capital (It Fails Us Now)"). They were invited to play Top Of The Pops and then promptly uninvited when they refused to take a condom reference out of chart topper "At Home He's A Tourist." Pals include fellow ASBs The Mekons and Delta 5.
Gang of Four cover art

3. Devo
Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale met as Kent State art students where they read off-center de-evolution books and wore infantile regression masks (aka Booji Boy). They're perhaps best remembered for aluminum naugahyde grey suits complemented by red 'energy dome' hats and the classic yellow industrial jump suit with 3D sunglasses. First album produced by 'anti-artist' art school graduate Brian Eno.
Mark Mothersbaugh's "Homefront Invasion"

4. Talking Heads
One of the best-known ASBs, Talking Heads met at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Having studied Bauhaus theory (see: "Burning Down the House", "Houses in Motion," and the album More Songs About Buildings and Food), David Byrne would put on performance pieces involving shaving his head while a showgirl displayed Russian cue cards to a piano and accordion accompaniment. Byrne only lasted a year at RISD, while bandmates Weymouth and Franz graduated and went on to form Tom Tom Club. Many believe Talking Heads lost all direction when Eno stopped producing their albums.
The art of David Byrne

5. Les Savy Fav
Named after the French art clique Les Fauves, Les Savy Fav also met at RISD, furthering the school's reputation as fertile ground for arty rock star meetings. During a legendary LSF performance, frontman Tim Harrington (film and graphic design major) once jumped from the stage to push a lit votive candle around the floor with his nose — which hardly compares to the time they conducted a colossal game of duck-duck-goose in a football field after a fire alarm went off. They have yet to work with Eno, but would like to.
A watercolor by drummer Harrison Haynes

6. Black Dice
Another RISD ASB. Also known for eccentric live shows, though theirs typically involved bloody violence, eardrum shattering squalls and mind-numbingly abrasive noise rock. (Today's shows have reportedly grown tamer.) Begun as an art project exploiting hardcore as a means rather than an end, the Dice often attract other poncy art-school types to discuss how 'affecting' the noise assaults are.
Black Dice at the Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art

7. Chicks on Speed
These three girls wear paper dresses and drop big-name artists like Cindy Sherman in their lyrics. They met while at Munich Art Academy and decided to start an art project making fake music poking fun at eurotrash disco, unwittingly birthing the inflated electroclash scene. Thanks, girls.
Chicks on Speed web art

8. Fischerspooner
Having met at the Art Institute of Chicago, Warren Fischer and Casey Spooner would put on highly stylized performance pieces in clubs and galleries in New York. Just in time to catch the electroclash wave, the boys rode its momentum out of the insular art world into big record deals and overblown publicity. They've also released the same album three times in three years. Do they think we don't notice?
Backstage with Fischerspooner

9. Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Having met at Ohio's arty Oberlin College, Karen O and Brian Chase started playing together as a joke. Karen O remembers, "We were really into things that are hot and sexy, and we just thought it would be hot to start a rock band. We weren't serious at all." One art school evidently wasn't enough to fill out the YYYs, so Karen transferred to NYU's film school, where she found guitarist Nick Zinner. Their first big hit was "Art Star."
Karen Orzolek's class projects for Multimedia Workshop I at NYU

10. Ikara Colt
Ikara Colt convened as art students at a London university and named their first single, "Sink Venice," after a '30s Italian Futurist manifesto calling for the destruction of bourgeois galleries and cathedrals. Guitarist Claire Ingram admits, "The reason we applied to art school was to get a band together."
Manifestos of the Italian Futurist Movement, 1910-1933

11. Travis
After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art, Travis moved to London to pursue their mainstream potential and conquer the UK top ten. Along the way they ditched their original name, Glass Onion, for a character in the Wim Wender film Paris, Texas. Cited influences include Joni Mitchell, who attended art school in Calgary.
Travis on the future of art

12. Franz Ferdinand
Named after the Archduke whose death sparked WWI, Franz Ferdinand also met at the Glasgow School of Art. They began playing after a kitchen conversation between Alex Kapranos and Bob Hardy that reportedly went something like this:
"Do you want to learn to play the bass then, Bob?"
"No, I'm an artist, not a musician."
"It's the same thing."
"OK then."

Jules Head thinks Marcel Duchamp would have made a great rock star.