feuds

Artist Feels Ripped Off by Lady Gaga’s Windows at Barneys

Apparently, Bill O’Reilly wasn’t the only one displeased with Lady Gaga’s holiday display at Barneys. In a video that has recently surfaced online, the multimedia artist Colette Maison Lumiere suggests Gaga should have given her attribution for the windows’ creative direction. Colette has been prolific in New York since the seventies, creating installations, fashion collaborations, and live exhibitions in studios, stores, and nightclubs — some of which, the video insinuates, reappear in Gaga’s windows. 

“Nobody’s doing something about it,” says Colette as she rides in a car, presumably toward Barneys. “So I have to take charge.”

Which she does, slowly parading outside the department store in white pancake makeup, black flatforms, and a semi-Victorian dress, carrying a sign stating: “Thanks a lot!” Then, from a Phillips de Pury shopping bag, she produces a paintbrush, which she uses to inscribe a statement we can’t quite make out on the sidewalk in front of the windows, signed “Colette the Artist.” The video also splices in images from Colette’s previous installations, including a 1980 store window with the statement “art is dead” painted on it in the same swirly cursive script. That was more than 30 years ago, but it doesn’t seem that art is dead at all. On the contrary, it’s just more deeply layered. 

Artist Feels Ripped Off by Lady Gaga