Lady Gaga never saw it coming. After a relentless, mammoth, publicity extravaganza for her new album, ArtPop, she was upstaged by a comet seeming to swoop in out of nowhere — the release of Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2.
Eminem’s sales boomed big, while Gaga’s embarrassingly fizzled, leading to quick deep discounts to keep ArtPop on the charts.
Eminem, now 41, did few interviews and personal appearances for this formidable double album. As with Adele sweeping the Grammys two years ago,
his instant commercial triumph demonstrates the readiness of a discerning world public to respond to power and passion of voice rather than to manipulative gimmicks or exhibitionistic stunts.
The greatest irony is that Gaga, product of an affluent Manhattan home and a private-school education, had boasted that ArtPop would be the album of the millennium in fusing popular culture with art. She hired Jeff Koons to design the cover, which features a vacuous Koons sculpture of a spread-legged Gaga, backed by a crassly ripped strip of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. During a London TV interview, Gaga betrayed her limited art knowledge by bizarrely identifying that great Renaissance painting as the Venus de Milo, a notoriously armless late-Greek marble.
Gaga with her constant costume tat fatigues the eye. Eminem in his simple hoodie looks like an ascetic monk, fed on apparitions and devoted to art.
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Eminem the real artist
