Can we get through this article without mentioning Damien Hirst? No we can’t? Fuuuuuuck. And I suppose there was The Pogues (RIP Phil Chevron) with Rum Sodomy and the Lash where their faces were superimposed on a Théodore Géricault painting, Guns 'n' Roses' Use Your Illusion I&II, where Axl stole the most innocuous of figures from Raphael, and even Coldplay’s Viva la Vida for Christ’s sake, the list goes on and on. Except maybe when Bow Wow Wow kicked up an almighty controversy when 15-year-old Annabella Lwin posed nude on the cover of 1981’s See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah! City All Over, Go Ape Crazy! in imitation of Manet’s Le dejeuner sur l'herbe. Oh yeah, and didn’t that French techno guy Gesaffelstein name himself after some high concept of universal art that came out of Fin-de-siècle Vienna, and didn’t the Sex Pistols play their first gig at St Martin’s and wasn’t that Grimes’ video with the big yellow snake inspired by Christian painter and suspected mushroom muncher Hieronymus Bosch?īut apart from all these examples - and David Bowie - art and pop have never really met eye to eye, especially when it comes to outrageous overstatement on the album cover shot. And Pulp and Suede and Factory Records who also worked with Saville, and Talking Heads and Duran Duran and Franz Ferdinand and St Vincent who were art school dropouts also. Nobody has zigzagged the invisible line that divides art and pop like Gaga has.Īnd then there was Roxy Music, who exhibited a certain sexy, sleazy art deco decadence in their album sleeves, a bunch of art school drop outs who later hooked up with Peter Saville. Thanks to Gaga's dalliances with art's leading luminaries - not only Koons but also Marine Abramovic, a woman who can sit still for months on end doing fuck all in the name of art while you try to stare her out - the line between art and pop has never been so blurred. 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. 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. It’s what the French and the pretentious call trompe l’oeil. Only the hair and the breasts and the fact it looks just like Lady Gaga gives away the fact it’s Gaga. “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. 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. 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. Rihanna could always show up, and there's supposedly new Eminem music appearing before the end of the year, and MTV has always been friendly to Slim Shady.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. That lineup is a little light on rock, so maybe MTV invites along former best buds Pearl Jam or Nine Inch Nails, both of whom have new albums coming down the mountain? It also wouldn't be shocking to see a Paramore or a 30 Seconds to Mars gracing the VMA stage. Kanye West tends to show up at these things, so let's pencil him in as well. Though he no longer owns a piece of the Brooklyn Nets, the Barclays Center might as well be Jay-Z's second home (or third or eighth), so he's a likely candidate as well. Sometimes nipples have a mind of their own and we just have to let. While embarrassing for her, it was the best birthday gift Gorby could have wished for. Oh wait, that’s not a Hersey’s Kiss it’s her nipple. Robin Thicke has had the biggest song of the summer in "Blurred Lines" (and is also nominated for a bunch of awards), so it seems like he'd be an automatic inclusion. Milla Jovovich had a rogue Hersey’s Kiss caught under her dress at Mikhail Gorbachev’s 80th birthday bash. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Justin Timberlake lead the way as the most-nominated artists, so they both seem like slam dunks (Timberlake doubly so, as he has a new album and tour in the fall to promote).
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