Still the master of reinvention David Bowie as the Archer. Photo: John Rowlands When I was a 15-year-old David Bowie fan in 1972, Bowie was for me a kind of teacher, so much more inspiring and motivating than my real teachers. In the middle of a mundane, mainstream world that limited possibility, his explosive mind and the way he represented it through sheer otherness suggested everything was possible. He was the human equivalent of a Google search, a portal through which you could step into an amazing, very different wider world - if he mentioned in an interview, or referenced in his work, someone such as Andy Warhol, Jean Cocteau, Antonin Artaud or Marcel Duchamp, I would immediately want to find out what he was talking about. He flooded plain everyday reality with extraordinary, unexpected information, processing the details through a buoyant, mobile mind, and made intellectual discovery seem incredibly glamorous. David Bowie on the Aladdin Sane album cover. Photo: Brian Duffy He helped create in my own mind a need to discover ways of making sense of both the universe and the self by seeking out the different, the difficult and the daring. David Bowie is about to be as much at the centre of attention as he was in his '70s prime, still taking people to new places, still using entertainment as an unlikely form of education. There will not be much sight of the actual, living David Bowie. But everyone who has an opinion - which these days is close to everyone - will be telling us about their version of David Bowie, their love, hate or indifference, while the real Bowie observes with some amusement from somewhere else, conceptually choreographing glorious, subversive show-business heat with Zen-master grace. David Bowie during his time with The Kon-rads. Photo: Roy Ainsworth He will keep his distance, refusing to be interviewed, refusing to engage in sales talk and idle gossip, easily avoiding the sharing, multitasking, desperate need to stay visible of the modern celebrity, inspired by stars like him, but lacking the troubling and truly mysterious artistic dimension. He will be invisible, in current orthodox terms, but he will be everywhere. So he will prove, after a two or three-decade dip in momentum as deliberately arranged as it was enforced, that his skill at inventing himself as an idea, a product, a coercive creative force, and then hauntingly positioning himself in our collective imaginations, is as brilliant as ever. This month Bowie will be cascading through the media landscape he helped invent. On Friday in Australia he will release The Next Day, the new album no one saw coming, not even those who might consider themselves colleagues or even close collaborators. Later this month, David Bowie Is opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The exhibition - which has sold nearly 30,000 advance tickets, more than any previous show at the V&A - is an examination of the way he randomly and precisely changed as speculative pop star and culture-scanning cut-and-paste artist. The album summons up in both ghostly and antic fashion the greatest elements of Bowie's finest 20th-century music and his compelling mental agility. It's a riveting blend of the obvious and the cryptic, of rock's classically comforting emotional power and its stranger, more disturbing qualities. It's a Bowie from the present remembering a Bowie from the past imagining a Bowie from the future leading to a brand-new Bowie, pretending to keep it secret and effortlessly reaching everyone who is interested. This album comes with defiant, poignant Dylanesque potency late in his life. Indeed, it comes much later than we might have expected that life to last back in 1972 when he was dolled-up, half-naked skin-and-bone Ziggy Stardust. He went on to become other crazed, disintegrating characters, lived in artistic exile in attractively unstable Berlin, and apparently rejected the conventional pop stardom he had until then seemed to crave, channelling abstract electronic music and insistent minimalism and part-inventing all sorts of techniques and genres for others to plunder in the way he shrewdly, showily plundered, parodied and distorted his own sources. The title of the V&A exhibition is, in fact, my responsibility. David Bowie Is was the title of a series of texts, slogans, manifestos and impressions I contributed that have since been fragmented and strewn throughout the exhibition, its merchandise and marketing. David Bowie Is highlights the fact that though the exhibition naturally goes back in time and elegantly simplifies his dramatic progress through the '60s, '70s, '80s and beyond - for me everything he has done makes more sense now, as history, as theory and as music, than it ever did back then. We can now see how much David Bowie defines what follows, not just musically but as an arranger of wider cultural attitude, setting numerous precedents for how to locate, organise and distribute information and define the self. Along with the name of his album, The Next Day, the title of the exhibition suggests that for all the looking back, for all his own borrowing and raiding of the past, he is very much about the now, and what comes next. That is a realm as tricky and dangerous as self-conscious futurists such as Bowie predicted it would be. Yet even as the "make it new" modernist mantra gets chewed up and scrambled in the pseudo-democratic, oddly cautious and fearful, babbling internet era, Bowie maintains an optimistic loyalty to the purist idea of progress, and the importance of distinctive, disobedient imaginative action. I felt flattered and excited, as a fan for more than 40 years and writer about him for almost as long, that I was asked to be involved in the exhibition, even though at no point was it ever made clear if Bowie himself had asked for me to contribute or if it just seemed that way, because I wanted it to be true that Bowie had requested my involvement. It was never denied or confirmed that he was pleased or not pleased with the direction the show was taking or not taking, whether he sanctioned the exhibition title and the subsequent effect it had on the shape of the show, or even if he really cared. His charm works in mysterious ways. I like to think, though, that he taught me well. He has made available his personal archive, detailed evidence he has kept about what he has been up to since he was a teenager plotting an escape from traditional postwar suburban limitations. The fact he has kept just about everything from invoices, articles, sketches and blueprints to glitter jumpsuits and stage plans for arena tours shows how much he organised his own destiny and anticipated - willed into being - its importance. The contents of his vast archive provide raw material for all kinds of biographical interpretation. The exhibition contains hundreds of clues about who and what he is. These should be satisfying to those who love Bowie because he was a mind-changing, sex-changing, species-changing glam-rock star determined to make a world-changing impression, but also to those intrigued if not entirely convinced by Bowie because he was a hyperactive, self-assertive, unashamedly pretentious performance artist with a potentially alienating, even self-indulgent, taste for the avant-garde. Whatever thoughts he himself had on the exhibition came filtered through a series of friends, intermediaries and members of his creative and business team, which somehow meant there was a greater weight to what seemed, possibly, in code, to be his views than if he had been more directly involved. There was no single entity named David Bowie co-ordinating or influencing proceedings, but somehow he made his presence felt. While the exhibition presents one set of Bowies, some of them more familiar than others, some of them so exciting the true fan will hyperventilate, the album is Bowie confessing as directly as he ever does what he thinks he is. Now. He is offering his own alternative to the established, over-the-top, moonstruck and repetitive view, and makes a case that while to some extent he can be neatly fixed into place in a scholarly gallery, the story is still moving forward, and changing. Indeed, the history itself is still changing, and in his own way he is ensuring that it turns out as he would like. There will be the Bowie on show inside the exhibition, endlessly discussed and dissected, and simultaneously another Bowie, outside, operating independently, offering his own opinion on the exhibition by appearing to ignore it, as if all that history is something to cover up with new thinking, just as he used to move further into the future by leaping impatiently from project to project. The whole point is that he never stayed put in one place for long, and now, just as all that movement is placed inside the staid air of a museum, as if his time is all but over, he practically and symbolically reanimates that core intellectual restlessness. He establishes a fabulous, counter-intuitive absence, using the album's artwork and associated propaganda campaign, designed with long-time art director Jonathan Barnbrook, to support a sense that even as the exhibition goes out of its way to reveal him, he is covering up his tracks and resisting the dreary modern tendency for overexposure and banal reduction. He seems to retreat from the very sort of diminishing hype and hoopla he helped invent, and yet with just the raising of an eyebrow, the issuing of a suggestion, the uncanny appearance of a video, he can generate immense publicity - created, selected and processed by others, but all based on him and his appearance and disappearance, his songs and, most of all, his voluptuous imagination. The world of fame has changed considerably in the past 40 years but Bowie still knows how to order, and disorder, his part in it. The exhibition is about the fantastic momentum he has created over the years, based on a collective response to his work that he continues to manipulate. Ultimately his contribution to the exhibition was to add unexpected fresh momentum by releasing, of all things, new music. He has timed the release of singles and an album to regenerate the reputation of David Bowie, so that this would not be merely an exhibition romanticising a star in decline, a celebration of a grand, faded myth, the expected accessible stack of image, effect and anecdote. He rematerialised as an up-to-date version of the original transcendent, didactic star that ended up deserving such epic attention in the first place, still in control as everything slips out of control. David Bowie is knowing what to do next. The Next Day is released on Friday. David Bowie Is opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, on March 23.