"Gaga's Album Cover Is A World-Class Work Of Art" says expert

[AgusPop 4,064]

 by Will Gompertz - BBC Arts Editor,  Former Director at the National Gallery of British Art  
 
 
Why Lady Gaga's Album Cover Is Actually
A World-Class Work Of Art
 
I’ll tell you straight out, this is a classic cover. When you’re listing the 100 best covers of the 21st century, this will be right up there. Typographically it’s an AA+, visually it’s AAA.
 

 


Jeff Koons is one of the best artists around: a funny guy who is seriously good. Here he has given us a game of spot-the-art-historical reference. This is Gaga as Venus. Specifically Botticelli’s version in his Birth of Venus (1486), in whose shell she sits and flowing golden locks she echoes.

 

 

But she’s taken a few stops along the art historical way. Koons has done to Botticelli’s Venus, what Edouard Manet – the father of modern art – did to Titian’s Venus in his painting Olympia (1863). That is to bring her bang up to date. Manet did it by turning Venus into a hooker; Koons has done it by transforming her into a pop star. In both cases they have done away with the wistful gaze into the middle distance favoured by the renaissance artists, and instead have their modern versions challenging the viewer by staring directly into his eyes. These are not women to be messed with.

 

Titian’s Venus

 

Edouard Manet -  Olympia

 

 

He is also making a nod to Andy Warhol, the high priest of Pop Art (with Gaga being the high priestess of Art Pop?). Warhol toyed with art historical references when recasting a pop culture princess as a venerated goddess in Marilyn Diptych (1962), made shorty after Marilyn Monroe died. A Diptych was an ancient hinged tablet or painting that could be used as an altar piece in front of which people would pray. The left side represented the living, the right side the dead. Warhol alluded to this by presenting Marilyn in colour on the left side and in black and white on the right. Now look at the background of the Koons cover of 'ARTPOP'.

 

Koons has not left out art references from this century in his post-modern mash up. Gaga’s legs-akimbo pose is taken from Tracey Emin’s I’ve Got It All (2000), in which we see the YBA - legs wide apart - shovelling money into her groin (I’ll leave you to work out the rhyming slang).

 

 

But Gaga doesn’t have money between her legs; she has a Jeff Koons sculpture, or is it an Anish Kapoor sphere? Either way, it reflects money metaphorically and an image literally: a surrealist mind-game worthy of Dali himself, who happens to be one of Koons’s great heroes.

 

His shtick is to play with our perceptions of fine art and pop culture: to make the low high and the high low. His Michael Jackson sculpture is one example, as are the ****ographic portraits of him and his then wife La Cicciolina, the Italian **** star, making out. The images are gross or amusing depending on your sensibilities at first, and then become darker and more sinister the more you think about them.

 

 

 

 

 

Koons’s art asks questions about values, taste, capitalism, reality and beauty. They are designed to appeal to our eyes and mess with our soul - and his new Lady Gaga cover perfectly fits that mould.
 
 


Read more at  http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/why-lady-gagas-album-cover-is-actually-a-world-class-work-of-art
 
 
 
For some "experts" is this thread  :shy:
 

Will Gompertz is the BBC arts editor since 2009, The Times art editor, The Guardian art editor,
He was a Director at the National Gallery of British Art  for seven years, where he was responsible for the award-winning Tate Online, the UK's most popular art website, and Tate Etc, the UK's highest circulation art magazine.
He was voted one of the world's top 50 creative thinkers by the New York-based Creativity Magazine"

[LetsGetHigh 52,683]

Whoever is against this article, guess what, he studied art, you didn't. :oops:

[daviddarko 144]

[Sexxx 5,492]

NME actually publishing a positive review

 

 

my favourite bit:

 

 

I’ll tell you straight out, this is a classic cover. When you’re listing the 100 best covers of the 21st century, this will be right up there. Typographically it’s an AA+, visually it’s AAA.

[Taylor 964]

What? :dead:

I'll read the other 1/2 in a second haha

[Didymus 32,928]

This review is a MESS. His references don't make any sense most of the time, he's basically praising it for the copying of innovations of previous artists. I don't trust it. Jeff Koons is not well liked among art critics.

 

The Warhol and Emin references are hilarious It's just delusional, I'm sorry.

 

He can't even spot the sculpture that's in the black and white part of the cover. He clearly wrote this in five minutes or he's just being satirical or something, since NME hates Gaga.

[Americano 31,061]

Yawn

[Sunbather 0]

Damn. Some big things to say!

[Bye 3,947]

All hail Gaga, the Queen of Pop :worship2:

Stan for her!

[zexion_armando 241]

Where is the sinister and darker? I honestly just felt he was saying things cause the words felt funny to say, unless he is speaking about the Portrait of Koon's and his ex wife.

 

But really...

[TSUNAMI 20,217]

I'm glad to hear this because I love the cover.

[GagaMyBlood95 9,808]

  And he knows what he's talking about!

[Evan Peters 10,338]

yass seethe album cover haterss

[PoshLife 16,854]

Finally a real authority speaking on the issue.

 

Basics and their edits can get schooled right here: http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/why-lady-gagas-album-cover-is-actually-a-world-class-work-of-art

[AgusPop 4,064]

SLAY

 

HATERS STAY PRESSED