"I Love Art" & "Music Minute" - The ARTPOP cover is real Pop Art

We have all been desperately waiting for Lady Gaga to finally smash us wit her cover for ARTPOP and make the wait for the album a little sweeter. And today she gave fans the chance to unveil it by tweetig up a storm using #IheartARTPOP, and uncovering it piece by piece. And hell,  I love it!

From the very first moment on we knew that ARTPOP was going to be all about the fusion of high concept art and pop art with high concept pop and pop music. And Gaga has left us without any doubt that she has the intend to make this album part of pop culture history and to defend her crown as the queen of contempory high concept pop superstardom queen. (Jeez, that was some fucking complicated sentence!) Okay now lets get directly to the cover:

Hello, cover! It is quite disturbing I have to admit. The cover is definitely not one of the covers you love on first sight if you are not immersed into the pop and pop art discurse. You might not even like it on the second, third or fourth view. Chances are: If you are not a Jeff Koos fan or appreciator you might find this one actually just disturbing. But I love it. It has the appeal of a graffiti merged with a Botticelli painting that has collided with a scissor. And then we have slashed on some pink paint and thrown it into the mixer. 

The centerpiece is a Jeff Koons sculpture of Gaga with blue ball, a part of Koons oevere, covering her v-jay jay. Actually that is qauite a good metaphor for giving birth to ARTPOP, a theme we are used to around Gaga since the Born This Way era. The statue of her actually reminds me of the statues in the Korova Milk Bar in "Clockwork Orange". The pose might be a revealing one and could even be labeled as exploitation of the female body, but in the content of pop culture and Koons it actually is a criticism of female exploitation, an absurism in the sense of classical art and an hommage to the naturalness of the act of birth and motherhood. Besides that the Botticelli background gives us all we need to see that a renaissance of pop and art and art and pop is eminent on ARTPOP, so get your tickets to the museeum and pop some shit up!