Saltz on Lady Gaga’s Jeff Koons Album Cover

Another day, another boner from Jeff Koons. This familiar-looking one is the cover “art†for Lady Gaga’s upcoming album ARTPOP by the art- world’s own private Teletubby, Jeff Koons. Gaga says this is †… a real depiction of my mind through his.†Which makes sense when you notice that both of their minds are between their legs.

The image looks like a crappy version of a Roy Lichtenstein sculpture or a cheesecake blow-up doll from an old 42nd Street porno shop, or a misogynist Barbara Kruger poster. It features a realistic cast of Gaga, seated, offering us her tits with her legs wide open. One of Koons’s shiny blue balls is between her thighs. The ball isn’t Koons’s actual ball, of course, but a reflective glass one like those ornamenting his recent plaster sculptures of classical figures. Gaga sits on a pedestal thing in the middle of a shattered-mirror sort of image with bits of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus behind her. I guess this is Gaga giving birth to the world from the marriage of her vagina and Jeff’s ball. Or the ball is their idea of vajazzling. Whatever all this neo-Cicciolina bs is all about, graphically it looks like the rinky-dink work of some bottoming-out artist. The thing might have been better if Koons had cast the art world’s Lady Gaga — that’d be Larry Gagosian — and placed a ball between his legs. Either way, as Mr. T said, “I pity the fool. “