After the LP, the deluge

The new coffee-table book “Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion” contains more than 1,600 posters from the last 15 years, but maybe the best measure of it is that it looks like the music sounds. That is, leafing through 492 pages filled with the phantasmagoria of voluptuous devil dolls and erotic robots, religious icons and winged eyeballs can have much the same effect as prolonged iPod immersion.

As the Flaming Lips’ leader, Wayne Coyne, writes in his introduction to “Art of Modern Rock,” recalling his youthful fascination with rock posters, “Maybe it was the different dimensions of the lettering or maybe it was the colors they used or maybe it was some strange unintentional miracle in the design of these flyers, but I believed in them and wanted to leap into them and infuse myself with them.” (Coyne is apparently no slouch at the old silk-screen himself, judging from the ’94 Lollapalooza poster included.)

This sequel to 1989’s “Art of Rock: Posters From Presley to Punk” picks up the trail in the mid-’80s, attributing the ensuing creative big bang to the arrival of the Internet and the extinction of the 12-by-12-inch LP cover in the CD age. A new generation of poster artists rushed in to fill the visual void, drawing on an array of pop iconography, including Mad magazine, horror comics and R. Crumb as well as Fillmore posters, hot-rod cartoons and folk art.

Authors Paul Grushkin and Dennis King organize the material in the book (Chronicle Books, $60) at first by techniques, then by style, and by imagery, geography, utility and other rational principles. But giving in to the chaos is probably the best way to go.