Last July, Lady Gaga revealed a list of top-notch collaborators for her new album/app ARTPOP, to be released on November 11—Inez & Vinoodh, Robert Wilson, Marina Abramovic, and Jeff Koons. While we've seen the V magazine cover shoot and "Applause" video and single cover by Inez and Vinoodh, plus Gaga doing the Abramovic Method in the woods, we haven't seen the result of her collaborations with Robert Wilson and Jeff Koons yet.
Gaga did make a pretty obvious reference to Jeff Koons' gazing ball sculptures during her VMA performance, but we all expected more to come. For her cover story in the October issue of ELLE, she speaks on the Koons collaboration, saying, "He's making a sculpture of me, and it's going to be my album cover." They were apparently introduced to each other by Miuccia Prada at the Met Costume Gala in 2010 and have been hanging out at his studio in New York and farm in Pennsylvania. Koons told ELLE that Gaga is "a listener," and she admits to "hanging on his every word." Gaga also reveals that she's been training in the "art of performance" with Marina Abramovic and Robert Wilson and prefaced it all with, "as a student of Warhol, I'm now the manifestation of his dreams."
This isn't the first time that Gaga has commissioned a sculptor to do a piece of her or her stage. At the GRAMMY Awards and BRIT Awards in 2010, she performed with a piano that had sculpted "little monster" hands coming out of it, created by Terence Koh. Koh created a giant, white sculpture of Gaga for her BRIT performance dedicated to Alexander McQueen, who had recently died.
Additionally, Gaga has been representing herself as Botticelli's Venus from the 1486 Birth of Venus painting in the "Applause" video, VMA performance, and on Twitter, which affirms that spending time with Koons has rubbed off on her. Just two weeks ago, Koons celebrated the launch of his Dom Perignon "Balloon Venus" sculpture and Rosé Vintage 2003 in New York and told T magazine more about his continued fascination with Venus as "the continuum of life energy" and as containing an "ability to be both masculine and feminine." Koons could be making Gaga into a Venus of her own, but we'll just have to wait and see.
UPDATE (October 4, 2013 at 10:30 p.m. EST): Lady Gaga tweeted that the cover, created by Jeff Koons, will be revealed at 1 p.m. ET on Monday with iHeartRadio. From the teaser, it looks like we may be right about him depicting her as Venus, or at least as part of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.
What did JEFF KOONS make of LADY GAGA? #iHeartARTPOP pic.twitter.com/riGrHzYlZ6
The ARTPOP album cover created by JEFF KOONS will be revealed with @iHeartRadio at 1pmET Monday on @CCOutdoor billboards around the world!
The head is crowning. ARTPOP birthing pains #NoEpidural SPREAD 'EM Venus the goddess is coming!
