Pictured: Jeff Koons' sculpture of Lady Gaga
In the increasingly out-of-control arms race of 2013 album pre-release campaigns, Lady Gaga's artRave was the A-bomb. Held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Sunday night, the event was ostensibly a release concert for Gaga’s new album ARTPOP, out this week. But it was also oh so much more. Part science fair, part costume ball, part sculpture exhibit, and part Warholian Happening, the artRave capped a year in which the music industry has gone to any and all lengths to attract attention to its artists, by any means necessary.
Sure, elaborate album rollouts are nothing new. (Read Stephen Deusner's recent Pitch piece for a brief history of online campaigns in the past decade.) And labels and bands have been staging stunts since time immemorial. But 2013 has seen such a high concentration of gimmicks, treasure hunts, and "mysteries" that it's hard to imagine how this can all be sustainable—especially considering the fact that revenue streams for musicians are drying up exponentially with each passing day.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter about Arcade Fire’s labyrinthine Reflektor campaign, the band's manager Scott Rodger said, "We're in an information overload, but just to be recognized you have to be more creative and do things in a way that people will talk about socially—online but also in the physical world. How do you become one of those things that people talk about?"
Well, one way to get people talking is to hold a bunch of journalists hostage on an airplane for seven days. The beginning of the current deluge can arguably be traced back to last fall's Rihanna 777 fiasco; perhaps, when the history books are written, we will look back on the 12 months between #RihannaPlane and #ArtRave as a kind of golden age of music advertising, and a TV show will be made about, oh I don't know, the millennial Don Draper who thought up Katy Perry's Prism truck.
Once Rihanna opened the floodgates, she was followed, to varying degrees, by Perry, Daft Punk, Kanye West, Boards of Canada, Jay-Z, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and countless others competing for ears, eyes, pageviews, likes, followers, and, of course, those rapidly dwindling dollars.
But more than any other current pop star, Lady Gaga understands the value of a good stunt. She's built her career on watercooler moments, from the meat dress to the "Telephone" video to that bonkers Thanksgiving special (soon to be repeated!) and beyond. Her ARTPOP promotion cycle has so far included tattooing the album name on her arm, getting fans to paint a mural of the tracklist, getting superstar artist Jeff Koons to make the album cover, getting naked in a video for the Marina Abramović Institute, creating an app to accompany the album, redesigning the USA Today logo, and, um, this.
All of which lead up to Sunday night: Lady Gaga dressed in a space suit, standing in a freezing cold warehouse on the East River waterfront, about to demonstrate a flying machine she and her team had invented.
Gaga strapped into Volantis
Before the artRave even began, Gaga held a press conference to unveil Volantis, billed as "the world's first flying dress." We were handed ARTPOP t-shirts and detailed information sheets describing the contraption sitting in front of us as "a purpose designed transport prototype designed to carry one person in a controlled hover and directional movement." Gaga gave a lofty speech about how Volantis has the potential to change the world, how it exemplifies the power of young minds, and how we were all about to witness something very, very important.
Then, surrounded by Tyvek-suited assistants, she was strapped into the device, which looked like a department store mannequin attached to a bunch of streetlights. It roared to life and lurched forward a few feet, hovering. Then it did the same thing, backwards. Then it stopped. That was it. Never before have I felt more like I was living a scene from Spinal Tap.
Hilarious, and yet absolutely charming. Here was one of the biggest stars in the world, with seemingly unlimited resources at her disposal, and she's chosen to invest herself in this almost quaint idea of making a machine that can fly. She's willing to make a complete fool of herself in front of scores of journalists, because she genuinely thinks she's making the world a better place.
And you know what? She kind of is. There was nothing inauthentic about the joy on the faces of the hundreds of super fans (aka Little Monsters) that filled the venue for the artRave. Nobody there spent hours hand-crafting their own personal replica of a Gaga outfit (whether it was the Kermit dress or the seashell bikini or the bubble dress) to be ironic. Gaga makes millions of people happy. She helps kids who feel like outsiders in daily life feel like superstars in her world. So she can fly around in her jetpack-on-steroids as much as she damn well pleases.
The Volantis demonstration was only the appetizer for the party itself. At one end of the event space stood a stage that looked like a big, white wedding cake. At the other end, towering above everything, stood Jeff Koons' gargantuan sculpture of Gaga, depicted naked, legs spread, with one of Koons' trademark gazing balls in her crotch. In between stood four other enormous Koons sculptures, as well as two bars, on which a variety of contortionists performed throughout the evening. Large screens played videos of Gaga made by Marina Abramović, photographers/directors Inez & Vinoodh, and director/playwright Robert Wilson (yes, the guy who made Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass).
Off of the main space, there was an installation by artist Benjamin Rollins Caldwell, "Binary Room", that consisted of a whole room, including furniture, made up of old computer parts. There was a room dedicated to the ARTPOP companion app, along with displays of Gaga fashions designed by her creative team, Haus of Gaga. There were also food trucks, including one giving out ARTPOP lollipops.
Gaga performs in front of the Koons sculpture (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for 42 West)
Gaga's performance was amazing as usual—a master class in over-the-top theatrics, campy gender-bending, and cheeky fun. (It can be watched in full on Vevo.) But it was almost beside the point. The whole Gaga machine, the whole Gaga world we were immersed in—that was the point. It was overwhelming, all consuming. Something even the best album promo cycles only dream of being.
But how can anyone top this? Have we reached the logical endpoint of this hyper-speed marketing madness we've endured over the past year? I can't imagine it continuing much longer without people getting bored with and/or annoyed by these tactics. Pretty soon, even a flying machine demonstration at your album release party is going to seem old hat.
So, where do we go from here? Album launch parties in outer space? Actually…