![]() We may not understand Madonna in the moment, but rarely is she wrong about what’s coming. “My sister is her own masterpiece,” Christopher Ciccone told Vanity Fair in 1991, the year Madonna: Truth or Dare, a movie capturing her Blond Ambition tour, became the then-highest-grossing documentary in history. ![]() More than that, she’s a living, breathing, constantly metamorphosing work of art, a Gesamtkunstwerk-her life, her physical self, her sexuality, her presence in the media interweaving and coalescing into the totality of the spectacle that is Madonna. She’s not an actor either, or a director, or a children’s-book author, even though she’s embodied each of these roles (with varying degrees of success). She makes music, but she’s not a musician. ![]() That people are still arguing about her-over whether she’s too old, too brazen, too narcissistic, too sexual, too deluded, too Botoxed, too shameless-underscores the scope and endurance of Madonna’s oeuvre. People have argued about Madonna from the very beginning. Lauper seemed to recognize what her contemporary was trying to do, and what she’s been doing ever since, often operating just beyond the frequency of comprehension. One of the few who approved was Cyndi Lauper, perpetually compared to Madonna in those days. This is, mark you, almost 40 years after Madonna rolled around on the floor at the MTV Video Music Awards in a corseted wedding dress, her white underwear and garters fully visible to the cameras, in an early TV appearance that an outraged Annie Lennox called “very, very whorish … It was like she was fucking the music industry.” At the time, Madonna’s manager, Freddy DeMann, told her she’d ruined her career. Read: The dark teen show that pushes the edge of provocation About a clip of her waving her arms in a diamanté cowboy hat, her chest festooned with chains, a cheerful-looking boy posted, “Someone come get Nana she’s wandering again.” “Lost her mind,” one TikTok commenter wrote as Madonna, wearing a black lace fetish mask, simply stared confrontationally at the camera. What’s most striking to me about the videos is how Madonna retains the power to scandalize each generation anew-even teenagers nourished on a cultural diet of Euphoria and hard-core pornography-with her adamantly sexual self-presentation. At 65, Madonna regularly uploads videos of herself to TikTok, her face plumped into uncanny, doll-like smoothness, strutting to snippets of obscure dialogue or electronica in psychedelic outfits categorized by one commenter as “colorful granny.” At 53, she headlined a Super Bowl halftime show-part gladiatorial circus, part intergalactic ancient-Egyptian cheerleading meet-while 114 million people watched. At 47, as sinewy as an impala in a hot-pink leotard and fishnets, she moved with such controlled, physical sensuality in the video for “Hung Up” that the 20-something dancers around her seemed bland by comparison. But Madonna never signed up for dignified placating. If you age in private, the deal goes, you can reemerge triumphantly as royalty in your silver era. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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