Madonna

?Celebration: The Video Collection?

Warner Brothers

Things have changed, as Bob Dylan noticed in 2000, but Madonna was well ahead of everyone else. Anthologies of Madonna?s video singles, like the 47-strong ?Celebration: The Video Collection,? are more at home with the movies as far as critical standards are applied, preserving visually the artist?s exterior evolution from her 1983 self-titled debut album to 2008?s ?Hard Candy.?

Everything from her fashion sense (or more precisely the trends she set, beginning with ?trash chic? in the film ?Desperately Seeking Susan?), to her weight, and to all speculative digital dissections of her supposed plastic surgeries (before ?Confessions on A Dance Floor?) can be inferred from this collection.

But you?ll have to rearrange the videos chronologically in order to spot the ?changes.? The disc liner notes are too small to read, so thank you Google and Wikipedia for the chronological discography!

Greatest video artist?

As a body of artistic output, ?Celebration: The Video Collection? is perhaps the best compact audio-visual document that covers Madonna?s entire career. Mainstream reviews had been mixed, with some critics disappointed by the tepid attempt at digital clean-up of the clips. Others praised the collection for being a substantial reminder of Madonna The Visual Artist ? a distinction often grudgingly bestowed her despite the increasingly obvious field-comparative observation that she?s the greatest video artist who ever worked in the medium. Ever.

Not perfect though

But while this is a superior and necessary companion to the 2-CD ?Celebration? album, it is not a perfect one. Why? Because the ?Video Collection? does not have anything on ?Dress You Up.? Everyone knows that?s Madonna?s best dance single, partly because this Andrea LaRusso-Peggy Stanziale-penned extended metaphor for fashion and sex was produced by the legendary Nile Rodgers ? the singer, song-writer, engineer and arranger who defined the tight, minimalist-clean sound of ?80s music that optimized technology without being subservient to or overwhelmed by it.