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The lyrical poet of power chords said he’d rather be dead than cool. By the time he was 27, he was both. In spite of his own ambivalent assessment of his worth, he has not gone gently into that good night. Kurt Cobains music, his spectacle, and his brief life reverberate in the echo chamber of global consciousness. He has attracted more homages from visual artists than any musician in the history of rock and roll. Elvis is king of black velvet, but Cobain (1967-1994) is king of contemporary art.

Why? Not because he crashed and burned, but because he burned and shaped that flame in his own image. More than 20 years after Nirvana released its first album, Bleach, 1989, the Seattle Art Museum is presenting a survey of art created in its front man’s honor, titled simply "Kurt."

Curated by Michael Darling and running from May 13 to September 6, the show features nearly 30 artists in all media. Although many are represented by multiple works, Elizabeth Peyton, who has painted Cobain with what could be called obsessive repetition, is represented by a single small oil: Zoe’s Kurt, 1995, which will hang on its own wall. Peyton has turned the musician into the patron saint of dandies, bloodless as an angel and lovely as a wilting flower. The colors of the thinned oils, brushed onto heavily gessoed board, are solid but look transparent, as if they hung in a church window and were leaking their substance away in tiny, faltering streams. Peyton’s Cobain is a solitary man on a sacrificial road, hoping to perish before he gets old. She presents him as Dylan Thomass heedless youth whom time holds green and dying, though he sang in his chains like the sea.

Jack Pierson’s Kurt Cobain, 1994, strikes a strong note by showing the singer’s name not in rock-star-worthy lights but in battered, mismatched letters, a corrective to Peyton’s glamorization of a subject known for no-style clothing — rumpled plaid and worn jeans. The grunge moment, after all, had its roots not in the exuberance of the late 1960s but in a small-town, poor people’s anticonsumerism combined with a tendency to let depressives set the visual tone.

Cobain had been dead four years when Rodney Graham went to the musician’s dreary Washington hometown to create Aberdeen, 1998, an installation of 80 slides with sound. The work proves that silk can be made from sows’ ears. How else to explain Cobain growing up in a rainy nowhere with a dad divorced and gone and a mother who threw him out when he wasn’t cutting it in high school? Graham focuses on the weedy splendor of a flat experience and makes it rise around us.

Gretchen Bennett concentrated on Cobain’s media afterglow. Her five small colored-pencil drawings in this show, based on stills from Gus Van Sants film Last Days as well as a range of press photos, portray Cobain as both missing and permanently present, bleached of color as he stands in the draining glare of the spotlight.

For Scott Fife, Cobain is biodegradable. Fife’s cardboard head of the singer, Kurt Cobain, 2006, is a ravaged thing whose message reverberates through its material handling. Fife made it with a knife, hot glue and a screw gun. Glue congeals in the cardboard bristles of Cobain’s hair and runs down the side of his cardboard face.

Alice Wheeler was photographing the Seattle music scene before it mattered to anybody outside Seattle. Later, when Cobain was telling Newsweek and Rolling Stone to get lost, he let Wheeler stick around. They were both in their late teens when they met, in the 1980s alternative rock scene in Olympia, Washington. Wheeler had a camera, and Cobain had everything else. Her small black-and-white portraits of him as he was finding his way as a musician are sweet beyond measure, but they are not in Darling’s show. Instead, Darling included a range of Wheeler’s full color portraits, from Kurt Cobain at MTV’s Live and Loud, Pier 63, Seattle WA, Dec. 13, 1993, to images of what he became after death. In the former, she caught the singer on the fly in a good mood, wearing large pink sunglasses and a shawl of Christmas-tree tinsel — Cobain found cheap charm in the Northwest’s endless manifestations of bad taste. The fully saturated color around him is jittery, as if it has a serious case of frayed nerves, but as he leans into the light, his face is serene. Wheeler captured Cobain’s charisma, the pure feeling he could evoke just by entering a room. Five years later, she photographed a homeless kid in a Seattle tent city who’d bleached his hair Cobain blond and wore a tattered Nirvana T-shirt underneath a plaid jacket.

Like Wheeler, Charles Peterson began shooting the Seattle music scene when he was a teenager in the 1980s. Unlike Wheeler, he isn’t interested in character and doesn’t care about relationships. Whether his subjects are musicians or street dancers, he’s tuned in to their movements, the way the crowd looks when the music hits it and the way artists fold their bodies around a sound to push it out into the world.

Even after Seattle bands became celebrities, Peterson didn’t want to take the money shots, the kings-rule-rock pictures. He stuck to motion, with occasional photos of solitary figures

hunched over and isolated, enduring the musical equivalent of a hangover. In Peterson’s black and whites, Cobain, at the height of his powers, looks like a kid in a garage band. It’s all there: the frayed shirt, the duct tape on guitars and amplifiers, the falling-apart shoes. In a photo titled, Nirvana, Rajis, Los Angeles, 2/15/90, 1990, he falls backward into the drum set on an otherwise empty stage, a cluster of lights hanging high overhead obscuring his reaction. In another, the crowd sags with eyes closed, as if waiting for Communion. Peterson caught the frozen-light frenzy of no-props music in all its minimalist glory.

May 13–Sept. 6, seattleartmuseum.org

"Art-Shaped Box" originally appeared in the March issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2010 Table of Contents.