Tellingly, Rust Never Sleeps seems to be contemporary artists’ Neil Young disc of choice. In 2007, when Lee joined the hidden dots between Young and Steve Martin by taking up the American comedian’s assertion, on his 1977 comedy album Let’s Get Small, that "you can’t play a depressing song on the banjo," it was Rust’s opening track, "My My Hey Hey (Into the Blue),"that he essayed in bluegrass style, the piece ending up as a sound installation and 12-inch single. The gulf between the original acoustic lament and the stormily electrified version of it that closes the album (the one used by Durant) is, for Lee, emblematic of Young’s uneasy, heartfelt transformations during his career (and, to an extent, those of the stand-up comic turned actor turned novelist Martin, too). In a pair of associated photographs named after the two tracks — and emblematizing a practice that’s consciously deflected into emulatory considerations of other practitioners’ approaches — Lee pictures himself lit from above, holding first an acoustic guitar, then an electric, with the long shadows he projects immediately calling to mind the familiar slouch and stance of Young himself.

That kind of willed projection, born out of abiding admiration, is taken a stage further in Melanie Schiff’s tender photograph Neil Young, Neil Young (2004). In it, a figure’s head is obscured by the cover of Young’s debut solo album, with its life-size carbon-dated psychedelic portrait of the musician. "It’s about fandom, genius, and awe," says the young Chicago photographer. "He was 23 when he recorded it, and I just found — and find, now that I’m older than that — it incredible that someone of that age can make something so amazing. It was a way of making it my face, because it’s me in the photograph, like a cover song or a tribute or a wish." The line between admiration and analysis is consciously hazed; Schiff, like the other artists I talked to, can happily spiel till sundown about Young, which points to a degree of investitment that exceeds callow referentiality and shades into something greater and more deeply seated. "I don’t think of him as a musician, I think of him as an artist," says Lee. "His work has a conceptual quality to it, and he’s not afraid to experiment and lose fans in the process," says Deller. He has, for Durant, "incredible integrity and authenticity." If you need one more reason why artists might love Neil Young — aside from the fact that the heart-cracking obliquity of "Cowgirl in the Sand" (1969) is more deeply art than almost anything this writer can think of — look at the artworld circa right now. Consider the obvious: the gilded toxicity, the petty snobberies, the encouragement of stylistic conservatism (at least once the lucrative moves have been ascertained) to which so many artists scared of losing status bow down, subconsciously or not. As the market burps out ever more bilious decadence, Young’s holographic presence in contemporary art assumes a ghost-at-the-feast quality: summoned as a scold, he is an exemplar of self-knowledge and audacious bloody-mindedness with few coevals in the artworld itself. "He’s managed to sustain an idiosyncratic career in a horrible business," says Deller, meaningfully. As if to say: if artists are looking to Neil Young, it suggests they’re thinking one thing, urgently, above all: How do I do that?

Neil Young’s box set The Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972 was released last month.

"What Would Neil Young Do?" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.