Lady Gaga released Artpop in 2013, the belated follow-up album to 2009’s acclaimed Fame Monster. The album cover features a nude, porcelain-like photograph of Lady Gaga, with Jeff Koons’s signature blue gazing ball nestled between her legs and fragments of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the background.
Though Artpop netted mixed reviews, it succeeded at aligning the pop star with the world’s most famous living pop artist.
Recalling his work on Lady Gaga’s album for an interview with MTV, Koons explained: “With the cover, I wanted to have Gaga there as a sculpture, as a three-dimensional type of form and with the gazing ball, because the gazing ball really does become kind of the symbol for everything.”
Granted, Gaga and Koons were hardly the first to attempt a cross-genre collaboration, but their message was clear: The kingdom of popular culture was theirs to share, and they’ve since developed a relationship that endures today.
Just last week, the influential performer took to Instagram to endorse Koons’s latest collaborative venture with Google, captioning the post with a verse from her Artpop track Applause: “One second I’m a Koons, then suddenly the Koons is me.”
To challenge your powers of discernment, we’ve compiled a list of quotes from each artist below. See the answers at the bottom.
QUOTES
1. “My experience with fame has been the opposite: ‘How can I stop this from changing me?'”
2. “Art in our family is the meaning of life. It’s an extension of our lives.”
3. “I’m not a pawn for anyone’s future business. I’m an artist. I deserve better than to be loyal to people who only believe in me because I make money.”
4. “In the overarching objective of my life, I am really only at mile two. I try to keep that in mind.”
Jeff Koons’s cover art for Lady Gaga’s Artpop (2013). Courtesy of YouTube.
5. “[M]y work has always been about acceptance and dismantling this hierarchy system of judgment where there is only one way to look at something…”
6. “How it connects you with what it means to be human, connects you with your community, that’s the value of art.”
7. “I want for people in the universe, my fans and otherwise, to essentially use me as an escape.”
8. “I’ve learned in life that if you don’t follow your intuition, if your intuition is telling you something and you don’t listen to it, you end up going in a bad direction.”
9. “I’m open to everything. I love all artworks. I really believe in not making judgments and being open to everything.”
10. “The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others.”
11. “But as you get older, you realize that you have the attention of a lot of young people.”
12. “I’ve always taken the opportunity to try to let everyone know what I really care about and what’s important to me about my work—how art can perform and what it means to me.”
Jeff Koons. Courtesy of YouTube.
ANSWER KEY
1. Lady Gaga
2. Jeff Koons
3. Lady Gaga
4. Lady Gaga
5. Jeff Koons
6. Jeff Koons
7. Lady Gaga
8. Jeff Koons
9. Jeff Koons
10. Lady Gaga
11. Lady Gaga
12. Jeff Koons