The Culture Show: Gaga - The Mother Monster, review Lady Gaga has recently released her third album and, predictably, the column inches have followed with the 27-year-old pop star being the subject of inflammatory headlines. But the real questions behind her new project, Artpop, a multi-platform collection of music and collaborations with acclaimed contemporary artists, are yet to be answered. Does it have artistic integrity and does it, as Gaga has promised, reinvent pop culture? These are what I was hoping The Culture Show's exclusive interview with the star would answer. As her fans (or Little Monsters) know, Gaga is a fascinating interviewee: intelligent, composed, quiet in comparison to her on-stage roar. For interviewer Miranda Sawyer she was the same, despite not having slept for the past 48 hours (she was working with experimental theatre director Robert "Bob" Wilson, recreating Renaissance masterpieces). Gaga was eloquent and insightful, particularly on her own work ("I don't consider myself a performance artist just yet") and the music industry ("They don't know what the f--- they are doing and it's killing young people"). Gaga presented herself not as another pop star on a promotional tour, but as a working artist who was frustrated within the confines of the corporate pop world. It's no surprise that, two days after this interview took place, she reportedly dumped her long-term manager Troy Carter. Presumably she's fed up with being treated like another plastic pop star. There was a problem with Sawyer's interview technique. She wanted to paint Gaga as a pretentious, oddball popstar. At one point she asked Gaga, a former art history student, if she had selected which artists to reference on her new album in the same way that Michael Jackson had spent $1 million in a shopping spree (as shown in the documentary Living With Michael Jackson). It felt like The Culture Show wanted to fit Gaga into the same lost child, deluded pop star box where Jackson was so routinely placed. The other irritating thing about the interview, a handful of open questions about general issues concerning the singer's career, was that it had been interrupted in editing to include "selfie" mobile phone diaries from Sawyer, making sniffy asides about Gaga's statements. It failed to work: this interviewee spoke for herself.