After Lady Gaga’s performance at SXSW and the puking art by vomit painter Millie Brown – and this girl is a ‘recognized’ artist hanging out with the beautiful people – after Jay Z’s references to a myriad of artists, from Rothko to Jean Michel Basquiat, in ‘Watch the Throne’ or from Picasso to Francis Bacon in ‘Magna Carta,… Holy Grail’, we must admit there is a trend in pop/rap: a strong desire to link music with a sort of ‘higher art’, as well as a desire to connect music with visual and performance arts. As a matter of fact, Gaga and Jay Z associated themselves with performance (and pedantic) artist Marina Abramovic, and the scene is complete. After all, art was the subject of Gaga’s last album, Artpop, and although there isn’t anything new in the concept since Andy Warhol era, it seems that now, the art scene is seating first row and music is in the backseat, just a pretext for name dropping and self-promo. Artpop was a flop and ‘Magna Carta,… Holy Grail’ wasn’t so great according to what I have read. I don’t know, I didn’t have any interest in any of them, but I am certain we aren’t talking about the Velvet Underground and its close collaboration with Warhol.
Art is now used as an accessory to promote music, it’s not an inspiration, it’s a promotional tool, that may or may not work. I am tempting to think that mainstream music is so weak right now that this is a need, a requirement to get all these artifices to attract attention and interest. Gaga and Jay Z take the high road dropping more famous painters in songs than the Met owns, and there is no meaning behind this. According to New York Times critic Jon Caramanica, it is a way to affirm a social status: ‘I think for Jay Z art is a real marker of class status’, Caramanica told MTV News, ‘He’s grown up, he’s wealthier, he’s taking interest in different things, so enjoying art and buying art and therefore rapping about art is sort of part of the logical progression of what he’s always been doing. He’s in a much wealthier class now, so his concerns are the concerns of wealthier people and art is one of those things.’ What a way to hijack the original social protest nature of rap!
And Gaga? She wants us to know for sure she attended an art school, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, so she puts in her videos all the art references she can think about, just to demonstrate she is above the Katy Perrys of this world, a pop star who can only pretend to give us a fake ancient Egypt history lesson. The pop diva made this very clear during her keynote speech at SXSW on Friday:
‘I don’t know what the fuck all I have to do with Katy Perry,’ she said, ‘Our music is so completely different. I couldn’t be more different, really. I really don’t fit in pop music in a way, but I came through it and I’d like to think I changed it in some way so you can feel like you don’t have to fit into a mold.’
What a pretentious declaration, how doesn’t she fit in pop music? How is she different from Perry? They are both using outrageous costumes to distract the attention from their boring music, Katy is just cuter and Gaga knows that so she now compensates by cutting edge art.
Gaga and Jay Z have declared themselves the intellectuals, they are the upper hand which not only can afford high art, but can bring it to the masses like missionaries in Africa, whereas they aren’t certainly producing anything close to what they pretend. I am sure nobody will even remember about Artpop or the Magna Carta albums in 10 years, all this will be part of the pop-hip-hop soup of our decade. Nothing really remarkable, not even close to a Picasso’s doodle.
Art in America online editor Brian Boucher had some direct opinion about the Gaga-Abramovic association, and let’s just say he was right on: ‘It’s a commercial, he said to MTV, ‘There’s nothing wrong with it as such except how unintentionally funny it is. I don’t think you could come up with a better parody of a certain self-important, pompous strain in performance art.’
This is part of my point, using so-called serious art for self-promotion (although in this case it works both way) is ridiculously pompous,… and hilarious, just like when Kanye West went to give some kind of talk about architecture at Harvard University. Either our current pop stars all suffer from an inferiority complex the size of Texas, or they really believe they are the new Mozart and Van Gogh, … but this desperate need to associate rap or pop songs to the art world lets me believe that mainstream music isn’t really about music anymore.
