Madonna’s Music Videos as Audiovisual “Performances”. Forty years of popular culture

In recent years, the concept of “performance” has taken on an increasingly specific value in reference to issues of education, evaluation, and perception. It is a word recalling not only the performances we do, when necessary, but the entertainment world, where music and vision combine to generate sensational events and the magic of fiction. In The Society of the Spectacle, written by Guy Debord in 1967, the author claimed that the spectacle had become an “integral part of our very existence”. That was true at the time, and it is still true today. However, in the contemporary visual age we are hyper-and-radically-connected and we are transformed into “sounding images” projected onto screens without our interrelational human parts. Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone’s career began in the Early 80s and it has not ended yet. Over those forty years, Madonna has constructed an innovative “poetics of performance” that has been studied by numerous sociologists around the world.