This gave me a headache. I wish you would just accept that gaga is taking herself too seriously, something she did last era. She made it all about art and that's what people expected. High art, low art....what? The album is entitled artpop. If she didnt want the public to review it as so, she should have went in a different direction
She put a target on her back giving the album that name, yes, but it becomes an easy target in no small part due to the presuppositions people bring to their idea of what "art" should be or necessarily entails beyond simply being a general categorization.
She put a target on her back giving the album that name, yes, but it becomes an easy target in no small part due to the presuppositions people bring to their idea of what "art" should be or necessarily entails beyond simply being a general categorization.
You're taking the line she sings in artpop to a new extreme, if this was gagas purpose she would have explained it that way. In all her interviews she says the direct opposite of what the fans are trying their best to explain what the album and the imagery mean.
The real tragedy is that people are so obsessed with the idea of Gaga being obsessed with the idea of being an artist, that they don't allow themselves to have fun or even understand her having fun.
It seems pretty telling that she would choose Jeff Koons for the ARTPOP cover, since he's not only polarizing but known for kitschy "reproductions of banal objects", his art being more or less the battleground for discourse on what is good art. It's one thing to dislike the music on ARTPOP, and something to which everyone's entitled. But it's another thing entirely to simply dismiss the album as bad art: lazy criticism.
The Drowning In Sound review spends much of its text criticizing Koons and Gaga as artists and the rest dismissing the thematic content of the album as vacuous. It offers descriptions of the technical underpinnings of the music, but doesn't seem to be concerned with offering commentary on them. Instead, we see things like "More substantial sentiments are few and far between. 'My artpop could mean anything,' Gaga theorizes at one point. Well does it mean anything? Does it mean nothing?" These questions aren't so much stupid as they are empty. And maybe they are stupid because Gaga seems to be beating everyone over the head with the answer.
Musically, ARTPOP seems to be a bunch of music Gaga likes and she hopes other people will like. If you (critics, GP, anyone) are so interested in the high art that you believe Gaga claims to be creating, then maybe you should pay attention to what she's throwing in your face. Virtually everything she did to kick off this era, the release of Applause, the Lady Gaga is OVER video, dressing as a Pierrot, contracting Koons to build a cover of her banal self, was a statement on her audience, an audience that she wants appreciation from, but an audience that wants above anything to feel superior to her, to reduce her to a naive and arrogant teenager. Again, Drowned In Sound concedes that the only defence for Koons' bad art is that it "holds a mirror up the superficiality of Western culture". I think Gaga is holding up a mirror to the superficiality of Western culture, but it's not in the way they suspect: sure, it partially reflects society's lame ideas (expectations?) of what art is and should be, but more frighteningly seems to show that people have just generally cultivated an idea of art being beyond the average person, something that by recognizing or submitting to makes you elite. If you're the average person, you believe art is beyond the average "artist". Art isn't something everyone can make, art is a classification that you achieve. To be labeled as "art" is something imposing in itself. And if you're "smarter" than the average person, like this Drowned In Sound reviewer, maybe you see that the title of art isn't imposing in itself, that you may dismiss things as BAD art.
I would say it seems pretentious, that people think they're so intelligent that they not only see Gaga for what she is--an art student--and have the authority to meaningfully dismiss her artwork (or non-artwork) entirely, but it's not. It just seems to me like people are scared of the idea that Gaga might be making art, that she might be making good art. And more than that, it seems that critics, be them of the average or high-brow variety, are so pretentious and so self-entitled that they can't stand to see someone else being pretentious and self-entitled, hate seeing themselves put on blast in the mirror of her album. Can't stand the fact that her album is really just a collection of a bunch of fun, diverse, outlandish pop songs constructed to reflect, dissect, ignore, and parody the critics that try to tear it apart.
You're taking the line she sings in artpop to a new extreme, if this was gagas purpose she would have explained it that way. In all her interviews she says the direct opposite of what the fans are trying their best to explain what the album and the imagery mean.
What new extreme? And what have I said it means in contradiction to what she's said? (Which would undoubtedly be in contradiction to something else she said, I'm sure.)
Basically, a lot of the comments seem akin to the additional scrutiny an artist like Lorde would invite if she'd entitled her album "REALMUSIC" or something of the kind, despite it not being comparable.
Although thinking about it that title would be kind of amazing as an ironic take-down.
it's pretty much just a mix of Speechless, TEOG, and MTN. I'm not getting the appeal.
