I’ve put myself in front of a mirror, off my clothes … – Lady Gaga

 

Multi-platinum selling diva Lady Gaga is fighting to keep her ‘Queen of Pop’ crown with a hotly-anticipated third album, but early reception in the US and Britain has been lukewarm.
“Artpop” signals a return to the limelight for Stefani Germanotta — known as Lady Gaga on stage and in video — after she was forced to tone down her usually ubiquitous media presence to undergo hip surgery.

“For ArtPop, in a symbolic way, I’ve put myself in front of a mirror, I’ve taken off my clothes, then the makeup, then the wigs, I’ve dressed myself with a black jumpsuit and I’ve told myself: ‘Now, you have to prove you can be brilliant without all that’”, Lady Gaga told the magazine Grazia.
While the third album suggest Lady Gaga’s increasing artistic ambitions, critics in Britain and the US are not so convinced.

“The intention of the album was to put art culture into pop music, a reverse of Warhol. Instead of putting pop onto the canvas, we wanted to put the art onto the soup can,” Lady Gaga said in an interview in Britain’s Daily Mail.

Lady Gaga has collaborated with a number of world famous contemporary artists, including Jeff Koons for the album’s artwork, showing her as a post-modern Botticellian Venus.

But on a first hearing “Artpop” returns to familiar themes — desire, sex, drugs, identity, celebrity, fashion, creativity — and sounds more like Lady Gaga’s previous albums “The Fame” and “Born this way” than it does a totally new musical experiment.