https://thequietus.com/articles/32986-who-cares-anyway-post-punk-san-francisco-and-the-end-of-the-analog-age-will-york-extract-search-destroy-bruce-connor-negative-trend some highlights
Located in North Beach within walking distance of City Lights and the Mabuhay, the Art Institute acted as the main conduit between the punk scene and the highbrow art world. For a brief time, those two worlds blurred together, with several bands – including the Mutants, Avengers, and Pink Section – forming thanks to connections made at the SFAI.
At the same time, more credentialed visual artists – not just from the Art Institute but also CCAC and even the for-profit Academy of Art College – found themselves drawn to punk, seeing it as a refuge from the more established art scene. “I totally got into the whole punk thing because it made so much sense,” says Target Video’s Joe Rees, who was teaching at the Academy of Art in those days. “It was an opportunity to do your thing, to live your life being creative. And what was the alternative in those days? Those stinky, stodgy museum shows and all those godawful art openings with that cheap wine. It just was no good.”
Boundaries were being broken, not only between the art world and the live-music scene but also within the art world itself. As filmmaker Craig Baldwin explains, “The San Francisco Art Institute may actually be able to claim it was the first art school that had this – they call it ‘New Genres,’ which is a stupid name because, of course, it’s not new anymore. But they didn’t know what to call it. And it was basically video, performance, and installation. This was another kind of sensibility in the art world – the idea that there wasn’t a ‘high art’ and a ‘low art,’ and that you could make video, and then it could be interesting for all sorts of reasons, but not necessarily because it’s beautiful. They would do all sorts of weird things with installation and light and smoke and mirrors that broke with the earlier ideas about what art-making is, what performance is, and what sculpture is. Those ideas came onstage, for sure, during the punk years.”