Offered for sale among the extravagant and lavish gifts of the 1986 Christmas Book of the Neiman Marcus Stores is a portrait session with Andy Warhol, available for the now-bargain price of $35,000. “Mr. Warhol will create an acrylic on canvas portrait of you in the tradition of his museum quality pieces,” the ad copy promises, offering a chance to own a work of art that is both “museum quality” and personalized to the customer’s tastes.
Art critics were largely hostile to these shenanigans, and derided Warhol’s recent portraits as vapid rehashes of his work from the 1960s. But Warhol was a shrewd and prescient observer, and he likely understood something that critics of the period had yet to fully grasp — that fine art, like so many other forms of culture in the late 20th century, had become merely another product to be bought and sold, a commodity whose value relied more on the artist’s name than on any intrinsic quality or aesthetic merit. What appeared at that time to be a move of financially-calculated surrender has since been recognized as a more complicated and incisive gesture. Though he fully embraced the art market, Warhol also held it up to scrutiny and reflection, revealing the ways in which modernist notions of art as pure, unadulterated expression had given way to a new reality of the artwork as branding and merchandise.
1986 was also the year in which Madonna released her third studio album, True Blue, which produced a slew of chart-toppers that would go on to become classic 80s pop hits and staples of her catalog (“Live to Tell,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Open Your Heart,” and “La Isla Bonita,” among others). Jeri Heiden, the designer of the album’s cover, later said of the work: “She was already highly aware of the value of her image and was in control of it. After I took the photo, it appeared as if she was floating — her clothing was not visible. She took on the appearance of a marble statue, goddess-like.” By this point in her career, Madonna needed little more than her own disembodied face to sell her music; she had become “goddess-like,” an icon in an almost literal sense.
In her 2001 book Madonna: Like an Icon, music journalist Lucy O’Brien makes a direct comparison between this cover image and Warhol’s work, noting its vivid, hand-tinted coloring that recalls Warhol’s early silkscreens of celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor and — especially with Madonna’s short, blonde hairstyle — Marilyn Monroe. “With this picture,” O’Brien writes, “Madonna made explicit the connection between Warhol and herself, the vivid nexus between pop art and commerce. The late 1980s marked a new era of the pop artist as a brand, and Madonna became the first one to exploit this.”
If True Blue signaled a new level of self-knowledge in Madonna’s work, one in which she was “highly aware of the value of her image” as a brand unto itself, then Warhol’s legacy, his witty, evasive manipulation of his own image and celebrity, was surely an influence, however indirect. But what, exactly, is the legacy of Warhol, and to what extent does Madonna’s career adopt its sly, winking critique of popular culture and the alliance between art and capital?
The answer to the former question is, believe it or not, still a matter of some confusion. Warhol’s most famous images — the Marilyn Monroe silkscreens in particular — have become icons of postwar American art, ubiquitous in popular culture and guaranteed exhibition “hitmakers” for art museums around the world. Audiences celebrate these works for their embrace of a culture that had previously been seen by artists and critics as “low” and unworthy of inclusion within the realm of the “fine arts.” But within these ostensibly lighthearted, celebratory images lies a kernel of melancholy, a sense of unease about what the new world of consumer culture has unleashed both upon art and upon our collective humanity.
Warhol’s obsessive repetition of Monroe in the silkscreen format mirrors the actress’s endless appearances in the cheap, disposable print media of tabloids and gossip magazines. The new culture of images will no longer be dominated by art, he suggests, but by the endless slew of pop culture products that defined the consumerist society of the 1960s. More importantly, however, these works signal the degree to which Monroe became an empty site for cultural projection. Does Warhol see her as the flirtatious, charming ingénue and bombshell showcased in her films and publicity images, or is she a tragic figure, whose insecurities and turbulent love affairs sent her to an early, mysterious death?
The answer is neither, and both. Warhol recognized the way in which Monroe had become little more than an image in America’s popular consciousness. Her enduring appeal stems from her ability to reflect each of these narratives simultaneously; any sense of the “real” Marilyn Monroe has long since disappeared behind a screen of cultural mythologies. Warhol’s silkscreens, then, are both a tribute to a tragic pop cultural icon and a knowing commentary on the culture of celebrity worship that she helped to create. If Monroe and her face worked to usurp the fine arts for control of America’s visual culture, they also ushered in a new era in which the human subject itself could vanish into an echo chamber of images and signs.
This critical aspect of Warhol’s work has now been largely forgotten. Visitors to today’s museums are often more interested in appropriating the recognizable graphic style of his silkscreens for selfies than they are in digesting the darker implications of his work. In this way, the ability of his art to look askance at contemporary culture, and to critique it, is gone.
True Blue reflects Madonna’s nascent efforts to skillfully control and manipulate her image, but it is a project that she has continued to develop into the present day. By the late 1980s, she became adept at dividing her career into “eras” in which her music videos and personal style closely mirrored the sonic qualities of her latest album. In 1992 she released her notorious Sex book to coincide with the raunchy, S&M-inspired lyrics of her album Erotica and the video for its eponymous single. Perhaps more successfully, her 1998 album Ray of Light saw her adopting the religious mysticism of kabbalah, sporting henna tattoos and turning yoga into a mainstream cultural obsession. As countless others have pointed out, Madonna’s success has lied primarily in her ability to “reinvent” herself, to imagine herself as a series of iconic images that occupy a large swath of cultural territory. Every diehard Madonna fan has their favorite look, their favorite moment in her career trajectory. Like Marilyn Monroe before her, Madonna is a figure who offers a number of “meanings” without ever really meaning anything at all.
Though O’Brien is quick to highlight the similarities between Warhol and Madonna, her comparison invites a more difficult, murky analysis than the straightforwardly congratulatory one she proposes in her book. In looking at Warhol and Madonna together, we must ask ourselves: how much does Madonna continue the mode of criticality that is latent in Warhol’s work, and how much does she simply exploit his understanding of personal branding and self-promotion? Can we read her career as a commentary on the worlds of celebrity and pop music under late capitalism, or is she merely using the precedent set by Warhol to make a name and career for herself?
Madonna’s most overtly critical attacks on popular culture tend to read as somewhat tone-deaf and unaware. In her 1994 single “Human Nature,” she lambasts the American public for its censorship and disapproval of her work during the Erotica era two years prior: “oops, I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex,” she croons over a sinuous, R&B-inspired beat. The song seems to suggest that the earlier album represented some kind of honest, searching exploration of Madonna’s sexuality, as opposed to the scandalous marketing stunt it was clearly intended to be. Why would she bite the proverbial hand that feeds her in this way? While Erotica was not her most commercially or critically successful work, the publicity it generated made her a talking point the world over, and it hardly derailed her career.
It is at moments like this (and especially later on albums like American Life) that Madonna seems to misread and misunderstand her impact as a cultural figure. Rather than fully grasp her role as the arche-postmodernist of pop music, a skillful (if cynical) manipulator of images that signify much but “mean” very little, Madonna recasts herself here as the misunderstood artiste, whose work represents a brand of “genuine expression” of which Warhol would have been highly skeptical.
This strange disconnect in Madonna’s thinking — her ability to recognize the value of images for her career without fulling grasping the implications of that dependency — ultimately led to the commercial flops and reduced cultural impact of her later career. One might locate the beginning of this downslide in 2004, when she launched the Re-Invention World Tour to coincide with her album American Life. If she had hoped to continue mining Warhol’s legacy and gesture towards it, this choice of title was a misstep, mainly because it highlights her position within late capitalist image culture too overtly and with too much self-conscious awareness to be effective. Warhol continued his coy game with celebrity culture and the art market until his death, but he knew better than to acknowledge what he was doing outright — to do so would be to shatter the tenuous balance between collaboration and critique on which his art relied. In highlighting her own history of “reinvention,” Madonna breaks the fourth wall that allowed her career to function so successfully up to that point.
Furthermore, the title “Re-Invention” indicates a new degree of seriousness and obsession with her own legacy that was absent from her earlier work. Madonna doesn’t seem to understand that her career as a “re-inventor” essentially mocks the notion of authenticity that was once at the core of all artistic enterprise. Rather, she frames her re-inventions as moments along a personal, expressive journey that sees her as a vanguard and maker of profound cultural statements. The singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright would comment on her subsequent Confessions Tour: “I went to see her London show and it was all so dour and humourless. She surpasses even Joan Crawford in terms of megalomania.” As Madonna became consumed with making increasingly self-congratulatory statements about her own value as a pop cultural icon (culminating in 2015’s tragically heavy-handed single, “Bitch I’m Madonna”), she seemed ever more removed from the sly self-promoter who had so deftly marketed herself from True Blue into the early 2000s.
If the ultimate failure of Warhol’s criticality lay in the co-opting of his signature aesthetic by the very instruments of capitalism that he hoped to critique, Madonna’s failure stems from both an overabundance of self-awareness and a lack of it at the same time. By continually reminding us of her own influence and effect on pop culture, she inadvertently lays bare the contradictions at the core of her career. What Madonna has offered us more than anything is image, a chimerical world of fantasies and desires that stand in for larger ideas such as glamour, female empowerment, fashion, and sexuality. Yet she would rather see herself as a musical innovator and artistic pioneer, two roles that her own career would suggest are not only outdated, but unnecessary. Where self-knowledge worked in Warhol’s favor, allowing him to occupy an indeterminate but fascinating and rich space in contemporary culture, that same form of knowledge was Madonna’s undoing, revealing the limitations of her understanding about what her career symbolizes with regards to the possibility of artistic expression in the postmodern, late capitalist moment.
In many ways, the career of Lady Gaga offers a fitting conclusion to this history, and serves as yet another warning for future pop artists who may choose to adopt Madonna’s pattern of conscious self-fashioning. Bursting onto the scene with her highly successful debut album The Fame in 2008, Gaga quickly absorbed the lessons of Madonna’s most successful projects and began to “reinvent” herself on an almost daily basis. Every red-carpet appearance and candid photo showed her in outfits more outrageous and over-the-top than the last. A lover of masks and high-fashion, avant-garde headgear, her face remained almost completely invisible for much of her early career, hidden to such a degree that for a time it was difficult to know what she actually looked like. More importantly, her music videos became highly-anticipated cultural events, replete with provocative imagery and a constantly shape-shifting personal appearance.
In these early, propitious moments, Gaga seemed more aware of herself as a collection of images than Madonna ever had. Here was a pop-cultural figure who understood the fundamentally illusory nature of her work and its constructed, heavily-packaged quality. By 2010, when her iconic video for “Bad Romance” was breaking viewing records on YouTube, it seemed that Gaga might be the ultimate fruition of all that was promised, but only partially realized, in Madonna’s much longer career.
But just as Madonna misunderstood her own legacy and succumbed to a flawed reading of her value as a figure within pop culture, so too did Gaga begin to believe her own hype. 2011’s single “Born This Way” was an almost cynical, painfully clumsy acknowledgment of her role as a gay icon that offered a shopworn and sophomoric interpretation of the pop-anthem-as-personal-affirmation formula. Her 2013 album ARTPOP was an even greater conceptual failure, enlisting art-world figures such as Jeff Koons and Marina Abramović to reinforce the idea that this was art, and not simply pop music, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Like Madonna before her, Gaga’s experiments violated the feigned obliviousness needed for such a project to succeed and revealed a profound shortcoming with regards to her own self-awareness. For what is suggested in the work of Warhol and even Jeff Koons, whom she enlisted to create the album’s cover, is that art itself may no longer be possible, or at least not in the way it has traditionally been understood. If Gaga’s earliest albums represented the potential for a fascinating transformation of culture under late capitalism — the possibility that simulacral experience might become a medium unto itself — ARTPOP was a retreat, a retrenchment into the already-discredited notion that popular culture could somehow replace or replicate the values of the art that had preceded it.
In the wake of ARTPOP’s failure, Gaga abandoned many of the more outrageous elements of her persona that had defined her work since the beginning of her career. Gone were the meat dresses and giant eggs, the outré videos and frenzied stage antics. In its wake came Gaga the singer, who showcased her vocal abilities on a standards album with Tony Bennett and a series of performances at awards shows and sporting events.
But “straightforwardly talented female singer” is an already-crowded market in popular music, occupied by middling artists like Demi Lovato and Jessie J who possess similar vocal abilities to Gaga but lack her imagination and personality. At this moment, Gaga stands poised to reinvent herself yet again, with a new single and a new album on the horizon. Though it is unlikely that she will ever recapture the conceptual force of her early work, she remains uniquely poised to offer new statements on the relationship between music, branding, and celebrity worship in the contemporary moment.
To use the term “failure” with regards to the work of Warhol, Madonna,and Gaga is not to suggest that they offer nothing to contemporary observers of culture, nor to imply that their efforts were fruitless or valueless within the history of art and popular music. Rather, their careers offer a cautionary example of the pitfalls and blind spots involved in creating a body of work that is both deeply entwined in consumer culture and “outside” of it at the same time. In what ways might new pop artists craft a persona and cultivate a career that offers the potential for critique? Is such a mode of criticality even possible in 2016, or is the inevitable fate of all critical culture to be absorbed into the very system it hopes to challenge? Though the answer to that last question seems at this moment to be “no,” these issues will continue to linger over pop music well into the future, revealing the limits of the medium to offer challenging, thought-provoking work in a market where such qualities are rarely valued or upheld.