BEFORE the iPod changed everything, most music-obsessed over-40s had accumulated their very own personal rock'n'roll museum, or library, or perhaps a curious art installation featuring a wall of vinyl, three leaning towers of Jamming magazine and a 12ft column of fluorescent pink flexi-discs from 1977. Then, seemingly overnight, this self-same bounty became "a load of old junk fit for Oxfam".
This year, though, the very same junk is reappearing in the sanctified form of historically vital artefacts, in two major exhibitions. Over in New York's Museum Of Modern Art (MoMA), three floors down from Vincent van Gogh's soul-shimmering masterpiece The Starry Night, New York's post-punk musical heritage is on display in an exhibition called Looking At Music: Side 2. Here, you'll find Patti Smith's debut single Hey Joe mounted under glass as if it were, writes a chum who attended last month, "a precious relic from an ancient civilisation", while Blondie album sleeves glimmer on the walls. You can also listen on mounted headphones to the likes of The Ramones's euphoric masterpiece, Blitzkrieg Bop ("hey, ho! Let's go!").
In London, meanwhile, Mick Jones, ex-Clash "geetar hero", brings us the Rock'n'Roll Public Library, his own personally accumulated rock'n'roll museum now on display to the public. Vinyl album sleeves twirl from ceilings, a room is wallpapered in 50 years' worth of music mags, the original Clash sleeveless denim jackets hang on walls, while books, fanzines and boys-own Commando comics can be found alongside artefacts from the related realms of drugs, crime and political history. There's also a pizza box which has unfeasibly survived from a Clash tour 30 years ago. This, officially, is a "guerrilla library", displaying "enlightening curios of edification", or as the 53-year-old ex-art-school student Jones puts it, "one big living artwork".
Ever since 1917, when Dadaist pioneer Marcel Duchamp put a men's urinal on display, called it Fountain and invented conceptual art, it's been up to us what we decide is artistically important. The incalculably influential punk rock heritage's claims are greater than most, even if every single one of our rock'n'roll generations - from the Elvis nuts to the Beatles fops, the hippies to the 1980s homeboys - believe their time was not only the best, but the most culturally significant and possibly the greatest fun (which it surely was each time, because that's what it feels like to be young). No wonder, then, that the middle-aged punks have finally rescued the actual physical artefacts of their over-analysed history from the fate they had long been dealt; dusty records and dog-eared manifestos, £1.49 each, ever-decaying in Oxfam behind comedy ceramic chickens with no more historical recognition than a bobbly BHS cardigan from 1999.
The original punks, it seems, are finally acknowledging (especially to themselves), that for those who did things first, who formed new frontiers, the art they created was at least as significant as that of the Impressionists, whose own pioneering big ideas were worth the 19th-century equivalent of £1.49 and went on to become literally priceless. And if we carry on like this (and we will), by 2019 and the 30th anniversary of rave we'll see Bez from the Happy Mondays curate the Double Top Museum of Madchester, possibly in a field, featuring E-dealers' original terrifying hoodies glimmering above us on walls.
Last week, meanwhile, today's best-loved maverick heroes, Arctic Monkeys, announced their latest pioneering ruse which continues their own generational quirk of being even more nostalgic than their parents, releasing their forthcoming new single Crying Lightning on limited edition 7" vinyl in Oxfam's 700 shops nationwide. It's the first new single to be released in Oxfam for 25 years. And so history circles on, forever.
"The exhibition at the MoMA," writes my chum, "was a beautifully-staged reminder of the evolutionary nature of real art, from canvas to vinyl, from palette knife to plectrum. Art can come in a gold frame or a leather jacket: its tools may change but its pulse-quickening song somehow remains the same."
He is, evidently, something of a romantic. So is Mick Jones. And so is the equally eternal spirit (and legacy) of van Gogh.
