Lady Gaga's latest dalliance in directing clocks in at seven minutes of dancing and grinding and Kanye West-style sacrificial bird-fallen-to-earth mythology, plus five minutes of rolling credits. Michael Jackson gets resuscitated. And Gandhi, too!
The words "pop" and "art" can be confusing. We use "pop" to describe a piece of music from within and without—it can speak to music's genre, its sensibility, and the reaction to it, sometimes simultaneously. When we use the label "art" to describe what's already evidently art—music, for example—we do it as a way of describing a particular expressiveness or originality or difficulty. We use it to distinguish "artful" art.
After today's Good Morning America premiere of her music video for "Applause," the real hero of cosplay, Lady Gaga, told George Stephanopoulos, "I really felt like I could be myself in this video." In it, she plays over half a dozen characters including a jester, an apparent emulation of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, and a swan with a Gaga head.
