If anyone is the “Mother of Creation”—at least when it comes to modern pop culture as we know it—it’s Madonna. She’s made that claim rather official of late with an art project of the same name that comes in the form of an NFT collaboration with Mike Winkelmann a.k.a. Beeple (one of the artists in recent years responsible for making the word NFT seem very profitable). And what’s perhaps most interesting to note is that, more than being scandalized by how environmentally unfriendly it is to promote NFTs, people are more upset, once again, by Madonna being too sexual. Even when it’s not actually Madonna herself—it’s just her effigy.
As such, it’s able to look as good (read: youthful) as she wants it to. Which is in keeping with her current Andy Warhol philosophy regarding the very overtly retouched photos of herself she posts on the regular. But this latest internet-oriented rendering of herself is a next-level iteration of the retouched photos. For in this NFT, her body can truly be as smooth and pristine as she wants it to be (without the accusation of retouching)—no plastic surgery required, as it’s not really her body. Nonetheless, the face of this Madonna doesn’t look much like her either (so much as a blow-up doll you would find at a Pigalle sex shop). But that’s not really the point of the project… not “ultimately.” For what Madonna seeks to do is, at last, create her own version of Frida Kahlo’s “My Birth” (a painting that Madonna herself owns and of it once remarked, “If somebody doesn’t like this painting, then I know they can’t be my friend”). And one is almost surprised that among the things Madonna births out of her 3D vagina isn’t, well, herself. Just to really emphasize the blatant influence of Kahlo. Instead, what she gives birth to is a mechanical centipede, then a bevy a butterflies, then a massive tree (this is a triptych, in case you couldn’t tell).
As Madonna describes it, “Using the opening of each video is essentially me giving birth, whether I’m sitting on a tank in a postapocalyptic city, or I’m in a hospital bed in a very sterile laboratory environment. I’m doing what women have been doing since the beginning of time, which is giving birth. On a more existential level, I’m giving birth to art and creativity that we would be lost without.” And this, to be sure, has long been the type of “birth” Madonna has advocated for before she entered her own conventional motherhood journey in 1996, with the arrival of her first child, Lourdes Leon. As early as 1974, when Madonna was sixteen, she was being a “weird art kid,” birthing out projects (before she knew they could be so handsomely commodified) by starring in a friend’s short Super 8 (again, it was the 70s) film called simply Egg.
In it, she cracks one open and proceeds to let the albumen drip into her mouth before lying out on a deck in her bathing suit, whereupon a friend proceeds to crack another egg on her stomach, let it fry in the sun and then eat it off her. When the video came to light again circa 2019 (it had already been revealed in a pervious VH1 Driven episode on Madonna), people were quick to pounce on it as being “bizarre.” But it’s like, yeah, no shit. That’s what art is. It is manifesting one’s jumbled interior consciousness into something that might make absolutely no sense to another person. At the very least, however, it will challenge others to think—not just in general, but in a way they wouldn’t ordinarily. That, in essence, is how “Mother of Creation” is almost like an extension of Egg (much to Wyn Cooper’s dismay).
And Madonna has never tired in her belief that the nude body—especially her own—is a work of art unto itself. As such, the unleashing of Madonna’s naked form in a twenty-first century format (the Sex book apparently has nothing on this new medium through which M can court controversy) was timed to coincide with Mother’s Day, with the announcement made just two days after. That the NFT also happened to materialize as the U.S. government launched an all-out attack on women’s bodies via the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade only adds to the pertinence of the project.
The charities that the proceeds made from the auction will benefit are also primarily geared toward mothers in particular and women in general, including City of Joy, benefitting women in the Republic of Congo, Voices of Children, benefiting women and children in Ukraine, and Black Mamas Bailout Initiative, benefiting incarcerated Black mothers. Madonna’s respect for motherhood was perhaps ingrained within her long before she became one, having lost her own matriarch at the age of five. A trauma she has consistently commented on as being the key driver behind her quest for fame—constantly seeking affection and acceptance from “the world” when she lost it from the one person who mattered most to her. And it was in the groundbreaking 1991 documentary, Truth or Dare, when she stated, “I think [mothering] comes natural to me. It fulfills a need in me to be mothered.” Yes, leave it to Madonna to make mothering a somewhat selfish act in getting the point back to her own needs—but, in the end, that’s what all parents are doing, narcissism often being a key motive for child-bearing.
And yet, the irony of Madonna showing reverence for Mothers is that she must damage Mother Nature in the process. For it’s no secret that NFTs are inextricably tied to greenhouse gas emissions. Beeple might have talked a good game about investing in renewable energy to offset those emissions, but the reality remains that the high energy usage that goes hand in hand with blockchain transactions can’t really be avoided. And it leads one to ask the standard question we’re all thinking when celebrities make a big production about giving money to charity: why can’t they just, you know, give the money without all this fanfare? A case in point being yet another very CO2-emitting affair Madonna was involved in called Live Aid in 1985. And then, Live 8 in 2005, the latter of which was far more criticized than the first production, as people had shed their rose-colored glasses about rich white folk trying to do good for any other reason than to put a spotlight on themselves. And maybe that’s what Madonna is doing with this NFT, in her own Leo way. She wants to remain talked about under the guise of “charity.” Or maybe she’s crafty enough to know that nothing will get attention on these charities like her “pornographic” digital rendering.
At a certain moment during one of her interviews with Beeple, she asks if he’s yet shared the work with others whose opinion he values. She then inquires, “Are they completely weirded out by it? It’s not often that a robot centipede crawls out of my vagina.” That’s certainly true, and it’s just a testament to how innovative Madonna is when it comes to finding new ways to show off her snatch. A creative art she’s single-handedly helmed.
And Madonna is determined to adapt that creativity to whatever era she’s in, having already dabbled in the Metaverse with her very own Moonpay-designed avatar (an ape that looks like a rejected member of Gorillaz). Which hardly marks the first instance of her constant evolution with whatever era we’re inhabiting. In 1987, she was plugging VCRs for Mitsubishi; in 1990, she was innovating the way the modern concert tour was received by audiences; in 1998, she employed time-lapse footage in the video for “Ray of Light” (a technique that soon after seemed to appear everywhere); in 2005, she was promoting the Motorola ROCKR phone (as part of synergistic cross-promotion for her then-new single, “Hung Up”); in 2015, her video for “Living for Love” was the first ever to debut on Snapchat’s Snap Channel. The point is, every aspect of Madonna’s career has been founded on the adage, “Adapt or die.” What many artists who have not remained relevant don’t realize is that the embracing of technology is part of that adaptation. And this form of adapting into the digital world is right up Madonna’s alley (no innuendo meant) as she herself seeks to remain immortal in a forever young state. That is precisely what this NFT achieves more than anything else (try as the haters might to say that all it achieves is inducing a nightmare).
And so, as Britney is maligned for keeping it decidedly analog and posting an incessant barrage of nudes on Instagram, Madonna one-upped her in terms of invoking ire not only through the medium that she chose to be nude in, but through the non-virtue of being even older than Britney and daring to parade her nakedness with such abandon. Even if in an alternate “reality.”
