Punk and art go together like safety pins and the Queen's cheeks on Jamie Reid's Sex Pistols record sleeves. But don't be deceived by the title of this epic show: it's not all T-shirts and LPs.

This well-considered exhibition reaches beyond mid-Seventies London subcultures to explore artists' reactions to the punk age in the related milieus of New York and LA, variously suffering under inflation, strikes, IRA bombs and CIA involvement in Central America.

Reid's swastika-eyed Queen poster leads us to Victor Burgin's stark black-and-white photo-documentaries of Britain's new multi-cultural population at work and its youth at leisure, stamping a vogue for polemical texts printed over the images.

Several simultaneous threads connect subsequent sections, exploring cultural changes (most movingly, Nan Goldin's New York "family" of junkies and languid lovers, and her honest self-portrait with battered face), emerging youth tribes and theoretical themes of the body as art.

John Stezaker's cut-up postcards of London are sentimental compared with Mapplethorpe's stark depictions of New York through eroticised flowers, erections and night people like horny vampires.

In comparison, Gilbert and George's summary of England through oak leaves, tower blocks and fighting skinheads is surprisingly lyrical, as is Derek Jarman's celebration of the Queen's Jubilee with the punk queen Jordan dancing by a burning flag.

Thirty years after the shocking debut of the ICA show, Prostitution, Genesis P. Orridge and Cosi Fanni Tutti recreate their sexually explicit adventures and the media's reaction. It will be a predictable talking point.

In contrast, the political commentaries include a documentary in the Latino quarter of San Francisco. It provides welcome realism among the myopic subcultures, while away from punk era clichés, Robert Longo's vast charcoal drawings of a tormented man resembling Johnny Rotten sit easily near the graffiti-art of Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat and the dawn of hip-hop culture.

An exhilarating, never-nostalgic show.

• Until 9 September (0845 120 7550, www.barbican.org.uk)