Monk has paired twelve album covers by the British band The Smiths with twelve watercolor-and-pencil drawings of circles. Like Minimalist artists of the 1960s and 1970s, he is concerned with issues of reproducibility and repetition. His work also incorporates techniques of the Conceptual artists of that period—stressing ideas over aesthetic or material concerns—and he appropriates images from everyday life and popular culture. Each circle contains colors also found on the album covers, demonstrating Monk's interest in the relationship between a mechanically reproduced image and an original, handmade one. The title, Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before, is the name of a Smiths song and an example of Monk’s deadpan humor, for not only is the artist not present in the work itself and therefore impossible to stop, but there is nothing to hear, only something to look at.
Gallery label from Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection , April 22, 2009–January 4, 2010 .
