After nearly a year of no Lady Gaga, the singer took to Facebook last week to announce the release date and more details about her upcoming album, ARTPOP. Taking a page out of Jay-Z's book (read: Hova's rap performance art session with Marina Abramovic last week), Gaga told fans that she would be holding "artRAVE," an exhibition featuring works with Marina Ambrovic herself, Jeff Koons, Inez & Vinoodh, and Robert Wilson.
All this talk of musical artists collaborating with visual artists, some even trying their hand at painting or performance art, got us thinking about some of Lady Gaga's projects with the likes of Nick Knight, Ruth Hogben, Francesco Vezzoli, and more A-list artists. Though "artRAVE" won't happen until November 10, at least we have these works to hold us over and remind us who's been on the art wave for a while now. Check out our list of Lady Gaga's Top Art Moments.
RELATED: M.I.A.'s Top 10 Art Moments
Hello Kitty Photography Collaboration With Markus Klinko & Indrani
Photography Series With David LaChapelle
Photography Series With David LaChapelle
Photographer extraordinaire David LaChapelle gave Gaga the memorable image for her first Rolling Stone cover. Nude except for an array of bubbles, the pop star appeared surrounded by naked models and doused in soap suds in the magazine's 2009 spread. LaChapelle also shot the image of a buff Kanye West carrying the nude damsel in distress for the "Fame Kills" tour that never happened. LaChapelle's photos of Gaga are visual orgies burned into our contemporary cultural conception of the pop.
Gaga Pays Tribute to Andy Warhol as "Candy Warhol"
Gaga Pays Tribute to Andy Warhol as "Candy Warhol"
Though Lady Gaga has not actually worked together with the late Andy Warhol, she has credited the King of Pop Art as a driving force behind many of her theatrics, even making her own video tribute to Warhol a few years ago. The pop singer also modeled her her own creative team, Haus of Gaga, after Warhol's Factory.
"Warhol said art should be meaningful in the most shallow way," Gaga told Maxim in 2009. "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."
Designed to be a space where innovation and art flourishes, Haus of Gaga consists of friends and artistic talents like Nicola Formichetti, Todd Tourso, Terry Richardson, and more.
Gaga Recruits Illustrator Helen Green for Haus of Gaga
Gaga Creates Dada-Esque Inside/Out Urinal Art Piece
Hussein Chalayan Designs Egg for Gaga's Arrival to the GRAMMYs in 2011
Photography and Book Collaborations With Terry Richardson
Photography and Book Collaborations With Terry Richardson
Beginning in 2010, photographer Terry Richardson followed around Lady Gaga for 10 months to shoot images for their collaborative book Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson. As expected, the book often features the pop star barely dressed (or nude), but it also captures the kooky in-your-face sexiness that is just so Gaga.
Last November, the duo also released the hyper-sexual teaser trailer for Lady Gaga's song "Cake," directed by Richardson. The sepia-toned teaser has Gaga in her underwear writhing around on whipped cream. We still have yet to see the full video.
Gaga Sleeps in the Guggenheim Museum, Gets Tattooed by Mark Mahoney
Multiple Collaborations With Photographer and SHOWStudio founder Nick Knight
Multiple Collaborations With Photographer and SHOWStudio founder Nick Knight
Nick Knight is one of Lady Gaga's main creative collaborators. To promote her sophomore album The Fame Monster, Lady Gaga launched The Monster Ball tour and asked photographers Nick Knight and Ruth Hogben to shoot video footage to use as interludes during her concerts.
Then in 2011, Knight teamed up with Gaga again to photograph the Born This Way album cover and direct the "Born This Way" music video. Staying true to the pop singer's style, the video opened with shocking, trippy, and strangely beautiful visuals of Gaga sitting atop a throne in outer space, which then slowly erupts into a well-choreographed modern dance.
Lady Gaga was also one of the artists Knight photographed in 2009 for his series of 200 portraits, featured on his site SHOWStudio. Knight also shot Gaga for Vanity Fair's September 2010 issue. While Lady Gaga has been a frequent model for the photographer, the two have also collaborated on projects, producing films like The Fashion Body.
Concert Visuals With Ruth Hogben
Concert Visuals With Ruth Hogben
London-based filmmaker Ruth Hogben, has worked with Nick Knight on many of the short films used during Lady Gaga's concert interludes. She actually started off as Knight's photographic assistant and fashion film editor. In fact, Hogben also shot the live interview with Lady Gaga for Knight's In Camera project, a series of interviews with various artists. She also helped direct The Left Eye alongside Lady Gaga and Knight (part of a greater project called "The Fashion Body"), which aims to glorify the human body.
Artist Millie Brown Performs in Monster Ball Tour Film
Steven Klein
Music Video and "Fame" Perfume Ads With Photographer Steven Klein
As a longtime advocate for the LGBT community, Lady Gaga collaborated with her fashion photographer friend Steven Klein for the music video, "Alejandro." The finishing product, which celebrated gay love, lead to a lot controversy for its dark images and accusations of blasphemy.
Disregarding the haters, Klein and Gaga went on to produce the similarly eerie, dream-like advertisements and commercial for the singer's first perfume, "Fame."
Performances With Sculptures by Terence Koh
Performances With Sculptures by Terence Koh
As the opening act of the 2010 Grammy Awards, Lady Gaga's performance with Elton John had to be a bang. Recognizing this, she commissioned Canadian artist Terence Koh to create a piano for the two legendary singers. Inspired by the claw-shaped "monster hands," which fans would make during Lady Gaga's concerts, Koh fashioned a dual-sided "Monster Claw Piano," which as its name suggests, is adorned with those very claw-hands, protruding from the Baldwin pianos' surfaces.
The siamese piano was such a hit that Koh was asked to design her piano and a separate sculpture for her Brit Awards performance a month later, which as a tribute to Alexander McQueen. Koh also went on to design the "Rubberman Piano" used during the AmfAR New York Gala and a collaborative charity concert between the two friends called GAGAKOH.
Photography and Film Collaborations With Inez and Vinoodh
Photography and Film Collaborations With Inez and Vinoodh
Much to the delight of Little Monsters everywhere, back in 2011, Lady Gaga unleashed not just one music video for her song "Yoü and I" but an additional five fashion films entitled "Haus of U." The videos and photo shoot were shot by Dutch fashion photographer duo Inez and Vinoodh, who held their first exhibition at Gagosian Gallery earlier this year. The first video features shots of a barely-clad Gaga smiling and dancing around, while the others spotlight invented characters like Jo Calderone (her alter ego), Yuyi the mermaid, Nymph, and more.
Gaga has also been photographed by Inez and Vinoodh for V Magazine. They also made a Mugler fashion film with her in 2011.
Performance at MOCA Los Angeles in Collaboration With Francesco Vezzoli, Frank Gehry, Damien Hirst
Performance at MOCA Los Angeles in Collaboration With Francesco Vezzoli, Frank Gehry, Damien Hirst
Gehry! Hirst! Vezzoli! Russian ballet! Prada! For this knockout collaboration, Gaga rubbed shoulders with celebrities from every corner of the art world during a 2009 performance titled Ballets Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again). Francesco Vezzoli's supercharged spectacle piece was performed at MOCA Los Angeles. Gaga premiered her song "Speechless" on a piano painted by Damien Hirst in powder pink with electric blue butterflies, while ballet dancers from the Bolshoi gave the work an added dimension of performance.
Frank Gehry also designed a massive hat that featured a giant eyeball for Gaga to wear, and Prada designed impressive chandeliers for the set. "It is that moment of fashion, that moment of performance, and that moment of music, combined with art and love, that makes what Gaga is all about," Lady Gaga told the New Yorker on the night of the performance. With Vezzoli's help, she certainly checked all the boxes on her arts to-do list for this performance.
