Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi?

For MOCA’s 30th anniversary gala, pop’s enigmatic princess will perform with the acclaimed ballet. Anthony Haden-Guest talks to the mad genius behind it, artist Francesco Vezzoli.

“It was really Dasha Zhukova’s idea,” Maria Arena Bell says of the notion that the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles should ask Francesco Vezzoli to create an event that brings Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi Ballet together for Saturday’s MOCA’s 30th anniversary gala. “We met with him during the Venice Biennale.”

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“Francesco immediately went to work, imagining what he would like to have happen,” Bell says. “And so it really came from the eyes, exactly what he wants, that night.” MOCA traditionally involves a totemic artist with these events. Two years earlier, the museum asked Takashi Murakami. “We worked with Takashi’s studio on elements of décor. This goes way beyond that. Francesco is creating a happening on top of a sort of bourgeois museum gala. And his idea of what that is.

“So absolutely everything that one would experience from the minute that they enter this tent for dinner—everything that anyone sees and feels and experiences—is conceived by Francesco as part of the artwork. And so it’s really a living artwork and a happening the likes of which I don’t think anyone has ever attempted.

“Everyone has collaborated with him,” Bell says. “People like Frank Gehry and Damien Hirst are doing so. Just to be part of this artwork. And making this an interesting one time only experience.” (Gaga’s piano was customized by Hirst and her hat was designed by Gehry. Other contributions include masks created by director Baz Luhrmann and his wife, Catherine Martin, and costumes designed by Vezzoli and Miuccia Prada.)

“Gaga is one of the Nijinskys of our epoch,” Vezzoli says. “So I don’t know if it’s going to be a great artwork. But so far I think I made a good choice.”

So what was it—apart, of course, from the presence of significant collectors and museum trustees—that would attract Francesco Vezzoli to another swell art world chow down?

• Art Beast: The Best of Art, Photography, and Design“They basically offered me a social ritual as a blank canvas upon which I could make a project,” Vezzoli explains. “So, thinking of something that could merge art and entertainment I came up with the reference of Ballets Russes. Diaghilev has always been a big hero of mine. I went onto a conceptual search, and I thought that mixing Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi would be the most daring, absurd thing ever. Gaga is one of the Nijinskys of our epoch. So I don’t know if it’s going to be a great artwork. But so far I think I made a good choice.