Lady Gaga - Art is a Lie
POST BY PADDY JOHNSON
I like Lady Gaga’s new single Bad Romance a lot more than I do her star performance in artist Francesco Vezzoli’s “The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again.” Debuted this Saturday at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the piece included Gaga herself playing Damien Hirst’s rotating pink piano, a row of Russian Bolshoi ballet dancers wearing Frank Gehry Muccia Prada and Baz Luhrmann, and Vezzoli’s interpretive needle point. Admittedly I didn’t see the work in person, but from the documentation I’ve seen it would appear the piece offers all short lived interests of an all-star game — a lot of famous people, none of them at their best.
Presumably some time after the performance, The Wall Street Journal asked Gaga what art meant to her.
“For me, art is a lie, and the artists are there to create lies we kill when we make it true. Francesco and I were like warriors on stage, trying to make a true moment….Art is life, life is art -– the question is what came first?”
Or to put it another way, “Life isn’t meaningful unless we’re creating”? Anyone else care to take a stab at this? I feel like I’m reading tea leaves.
I think she means that (good) art is a challenge, in that it creates alternate non-realities that we, as viewers, are forced to interpret and therefore make real.
art is a lie
&
Art is life, life is art
=
life is a lie.
Francesco and I were…trying to make a true moment
=
Francesco and I were…trying to make a not lie moment / or / trying to make a not art moment / trying to make a not life moment.
Clearly not, but that’s what I got out of it.
there’s something there about authenticity of experience…? not sure. also, the video is broken.
They removed that quickly.
An unsuccessful attempt to sound terribly clever and “high brow”
Nothing deep.
Oscar Wilde made famous the idea that life itself is a performance piece–art. Life and Art are indistinguishable.
The ‘lie’ is not some kind of false fact.
But to say that how one crafts their experience in life is somehow separate from their art is a lie.
Art is a presentation of one’s self through a medium, and life (everything outside of the canvas, off the stage) is an equally creative opportunity.
Gaga will not be known for the profundity of a few compositions, but the grand performance of her life–her aesthetics, her interviews, her outreach to the gay community, etc etc which all amount to her impact / history / arttt
SEE:
Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying”
http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/decay.html
Didn’t Natalie Portman’s character in Closer say “Art is a lie” as well? Just saying…