The article on Fleet Foxes winning the Art Vinyl's Best Art Vinyl 2008  posted by the Bridgeman Art Library starts by asking why the band chose Breughel's painting Netherlandish Proverbs for the cover of their album. Further on in the article it gives the answer as posted by a band member on a blog discussion. The answer is simple enough, the band like the painting.

For the full thread see Brooklyn Vegan's blog.

The article and blog also raise several other questions. Firstly, why do two of the top three covers use old paintings? Art Vinyl sell frames for displaying your album covers on the wall, could it be that old paintings look better on the wall than album covers?

There is also the question of Fleet Foxes being lazy and not bothering to think about the cover desi. It's long been common in the book world. Many of the battered old penguins on my bookshelf have paintings on the cover, and Sartre's Age of Reason has Picasso's Guernica wrapped around it (how pretentious is that?). Other bands have used paintings on their covers without being lazy or pretentious, for example Sonic Youth using Gerhard Richter's Candle on Daydream Nation

or Bauhaus using Paul Delvaux's Venus Asleep on Dark Entries (though there may be a slight hint of pretention there).

If you look up what Wikipedia has to say on Netherlandish Proverbs you will discover that it really does depict a huge number of proverbs. Many of them are familiar, but whatever happened to "To have the roof tiled with tarts" or "Horse droppings are not figs"?

Other questions I have relate to the poll. There doesn't seem to be much about it on the Art Vinyl site.  Who were the people who voted on the award and who chose the covers included in the poll? Did people vote solely on the cover, or were they influenced by the music. I'm sure I would have been tempted to vote for Elbow, even if it might not be the best cover.

And was it Pieter Brueghel the Elder or Pieter Brueghel the Younger who painted the work? The somewhat surprising answer is that they both did. Dad did the original, but young Pieter did up to 20 copies of the work.

And if you're wondering what happened to the man shitting on the world (mentioned in the article), sadly he failed to make the final cut, and it just off to the left.