celebrity=commodity=art

hey friends! im copying and pasting a speech i made at work yesterday for toastmasters (my boss told me i speak too 'off the cuff' and need to sign up for this). its great because in speeches, you don't have to reference or cite anything like you normally would in a research paper or academic essay! so here it is, straight from my mouth to your eyes!

THE COMMODITIZATION OF CELEBRITY: WARHOL TO GAGA

For those of you who don’t listen to pop radio, Lady Gaga is a singer who is known for her hits such as ‘Just Dance,’ ‘Love Game,’ and ‘Poker Face.’ My speech this week will focus on the elements of Lady Gaga’s ideology and persona that reference the Pop Art movement of the 60s and 70s and specifically the famous artist Andy Warhol.

So let’s back up a bit. Around the turn of the 20th century, there were several movements in fine art history that came to be known under an umbrella of “modern art.” There was cubism, surrealism and art noveau to name a few. These movements, led by famous artists such as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali were based in the construction and deconstruction of the formal image. The fine art paintings were created by master artists who sold their paintings for large sums to wealthy patrons.

But after World War 2, a new sort of art emerged. This art was one that drew inspiration from commercial advertisements and everyday, mass-produced objects. In 1964, Andy Warhol silk screened an image of the Campbell’s soup can on a canvas, and displayed it in an art gallery along with signed cans of Campbell’s tomato soup. The image on canvas was bought by an art patron for $1,500 and the soup cans were sold individually for $6.

This painting of a soup can flew in the face of centuries of fine art history. Now, art could be quickly made, in bulk, just like a product at the supermarket. This new art, known as Pop Art, was fast and it referenced popular culture by choosing banal consumer goods as subjects- like coca cola, billboards, soup cans. Pop Art also embraced mass production techniques such as silk-screening to create repetitive, multiple images. It transformed the art scene from one of exclusive intellectuals to an art that could be instantly understood and consumed by the masses.

The commercialization of art was a huge deal. Now art was not a fine luxury, it was a product that could be multiplied and cheaply sold just like bread and milk. By this time, modern life was all about images and surface appearances. With the vision of artists like Warhol, art inevitably became past of a fast- take quick-buck culture, which competed with other forms of visual culture such as photography and television.

Warhol was also fascinated with what he called the ‘cult of celebrity.’ He coined the term '15 Minutes of Fame’ as a way to describe the fleeting condition of celebrity. Eventually, Warhol pared his image vocabulary down to the icon itself – to brand names, celebrities, dollar signs – and removed all traces of the artist's "hand" in the production of his paintings. His prolific portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong, Elizabeth Taylor and himself have been saturated into the modern American cultural landscape. Through his self-portraits, films, and over-the-top persona, Warhol essentially transformed himself into a product to be consumed.

Warhol’s studio in midtown Manhattan ,where his paintings were mass produced by his assistants, was known as The Factory. The Factory was a place where young artist from all over would come to collaborate on artistic ideas, and make films and art together. It was a hip scene and the place to be during the cultural and artistic revolutions of the 60s and 70s.

This is where Lady Gaga comes in. Lady Gaga, whose name comes from a reference to the Queen song ‘Radio Ga Ga,’ works with a creative team modeled after Warhol’s Factory. Known as the “Haus of Gaga,’ this team of designers have created the Lady Gaga persona. Through the design of her costumes, stage sets and sound, the Haus of Gaga, under Lady Gaga’s direction, have created a celebrity- a commodity to be consumed by the mass public.

Lady Gaga is at her core, a singer and piano player who has been compared to Blondie, Madonna, and Elton John in his flamboyant early years. Gaga wrote and produced her album and has written for other pop singers such as Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls. She is well known for her outlandish costumes, like the dress made completely of plastic bubbles. Gaga has been quoted in interviews as saying “I’m self manufactured.. I look at it not as poison or lowbrow, but looking at it in a very highbrow way, and self-making myself to be a powerful visionary and say something that will genuinely speak to people.”

It’s not surprising that Gaga rose to fame after studying art at NYU. Lady Gaga has referenced Warhol’s influence in interviews, saying “Warhol said art should be meaningful in the most shallow way. He was able to make commercial art that was taken seriously as fine art, to use something simple and shallow and take it to another planet. That's what I'm doing too. When you listen to a song like 'Love Game,' is it communicating my soul to you? No ... I make soulless electronic pop. But when you're on ecstasy in a nightclub grinding up against someone and my music comes on, you'll feel soul."

The point of her pop music, she adds, isn’t merely to entertain, but to provoke response and discussion. “How do I make pop, commercial art be taken as seriously as fine art? That’s what Warhol did. How do I make music and performances that are thought-provoking, fresh and future? We decide what’s good and, if the ideas are powerful enough, we can convince the world that it’s great.” It is clear that Andy Warhol and the pop art movement continue to influence and motivate new generations of artists, especially Lady Gaga.