Lady Gaga's 'Artpop' Is Revolutionary

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.

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. Nobody has zigzagged the invisible line that divides art and pop like Gaga has.

Except for, maybe, Andy Warhol, who painted a big yellow banana on the cover of the 1967 Velvet Underground and Nico record. The same Andy Warhol who moonlighted again in 1971 showing the music industry how pop iconography should be done when he popped a zip on the cover sleeve of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. Oh yeah, and The Pink Floyd, before they dropped the “the” prefix and turned into a toker’s Dire Straits, who were fairly floppy and arty and into psychedelic visuals in a big way. And didn’t the Beatles steal the backward tape loops idea from London’s avant garde scene and then enroll artist Peter Blake to design the cover of Sgt Pepper?

And 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. 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. 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?

But 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. 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. 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. Can we get through this article without mentioning Damien Hirst? No we can’t? Fuuuuuuck.

Oh I guess Gaga and Koons aren't revolutionaries after all. Sorry about that, as you were.

Follow Jeremy on Twitter @Jeres

Read more like this

How Lady Gaga Potentially Trolled The Internet

Are Beyoncé, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga Changing the Game?

I went To Pete Doherty's Private Art Show