The world was agog this week as two notorious
exhibitionists, Lady Gaga off of pop music and Jeff Koons off of
contemporary art, pulled together like tectonic plates in seismic
activity. It might not seem like a big deal, he designed her album
artwork, but they have in fact heralded a new beginning in the way
sound and vision will coalesce in future. The pop icon and the New
York-based neo-pop artist have come together and produced a stultifying
work of wonder that will be reproduced millions of times. Such
innovation has left the rest of us metaphorically pointing into the sky
at passing aeroplanes like those cargo cults of the South Pacific. It’s
okay to feel a little helpless.
Let us be clear, Artpop is an
album - like those other thousands of albums we’ve been listening to for
decades and our parents listened to before us and their parents before
them - but it is so much more. What does Artpop say to us? It says “this
isn’t just an album cover, it’s a movement, a brand, a new era in
sensuality, painted in neon pink and Yves Klein blue, called Artpop.”
It’s a bit like another Modernist movement, Pop Art, but its newer and
the words have been inverted and the space has been taken out. Pop Art
sprung up in the mid-50s, and it cheated for at least a decade by not
having any pop in it at all.
“Are we looking upon Lady Gaga or
Botticelli’s the Birth of Venus?” we ask ourselves as the images are
chopped up and configured together with Koons’ most glittery glue-gun
and rhinestone scissors. Only the hair and the breasts and the fact it
looks just like Lady Gaga gives away the fact it’s Gaga. It’s what the
French and the pretentious call trompe l’oeil. We all double take a
little bit, like getting an autograph from Jo Whiley only to discover
when examining the signature that it was actually Benedict Cumberbatch
dressed as Julian Assange. Yes, Artpop is the visual equivalent of a
lucky day, not only are we getting a Botticelli - one of the masters of
the early Renaissance - but we’re getting a Koons too.
http://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/blog/is-art-pop-really-just-a-new-thing
No comments:
Post a Comment