Celebrities have always served as vehicles for vicariousness, voicing or living out the social fantasies we don’t allow our own selves to confront.

"I'm a normal height. I have a normal figure. I don't sing any better than other people. In fact, there isn't anything on the outside of me that is in any way abnormal. I think it's what's underneath, on the inside that's not normal." – Madonna, 1985

When assessing a cultural phenomenon, one must obviously bear in mind the time and the place in which it takes place. And when it comes to Madonna, it isn’t any different.

She embodies the core nature of contemporary America and the very fabric of the myth we call “the American dream.” And while she is famous throughout the world, she doesn’t cease to be an essentially American phenomenon — probably the very reason why she is also famous abroad.

Madonna was able to trampoline herself into the top of the world working with very mediocre ingredients. An average voice, average looks, average hometown, average financial situation, 5-foot-4 and a gap between her front teeth, she managed to, with incredible ambition, effort and will power, transform her ordinary gifts into Midas-esque assets.

Like a sculptor who turns clay into a masterpiece only via unprecedented concentration, discipline and a vision. And in America, we reward the ordinary gone extraordinary with admiration. And a bit of envy.

Madonna couldn’t have constructed her persona anywhere else in the world because she represents all that which the American collective unconscious desires: this fierce capability to turn mediocrity into gold and a flawless physicality that doesn’t seem to age.

And yet, she isn’t overtly intellectual, which would make her personality intimidating.

We like our celebrities physically inhuman but intellectually, closer to null. But mostly we like them tamed.

Limited to our own idea of what they should represent and how far they should go. We give them boundaries and just enough room to grow so they do not become a threat. They are our Barbie dolls.

So even with all of her provocative nature, Madonna manages to be surprising without crossing a certain level of expectations. We, the audience, allow her to embody the lack of prudishness we wish we had the balls to live. But once she gets more socially conscious (“American Life”), she becomes alienating to our own imagination of what roles she is allowed to play.

As long as the unabashed display of sexual freedom is coming from “the other” (an “other” we have grown familiar with) we have nothing to worry about.

Celebrities have always served as vehicles for vicariousness, voicing or living out the social fantasies we don’t allow our own selves to confront. So as we allocate to blacks the dirty job of glamorizing violence, misogyny and consumerism, Madonna has been our sexual escape valve for a few decades.

Philosopher Jacques Derrida wisely said that because all text has ambiguity, “a final and complete interpretation is impossible.” And the way Madonna’s iconic figure and art works have come to being feels slightly similar to this post-structural essence.

The appeal of a Madonna piece is not the piece itself — a particular song or a film — but all the ramifications that are built around that beginning.

Very few of Madonna’s songs can stand alone. But when they come accompanied by a series of meaning-giving complications — music videos, photographs, live performances, interviews and media coverage — they cease to be just a song and begin to represent all of these another “texts” that relate to it — Madonna being the god-like connection linking all of them together.

So Madonna is the ultimate multi-media artist, bringing the very construction of her public persona into the mix of her oeuvres.

We love Madonna because we feel like the concoctions of her texts belong to her. She comes off as the auteur of her existence both private and publicly — a role reversal for both traditional representations of women and show business artists.

In that sense, Madonna is the ultimate artist for a music video and post-medium age (“post-medium” in the same sense of “post-colonial,” after an exacerbated usage of media in the quotidian, not after it). Every time she re-emerges, frozen by time but evolved with the times, she creates a new sense of aesthetics.

This constant unfolding of texts inhabiting different media and overflowing self-assertiveness. She seems to translate the sterility of the zeitgeist into some sort of avant-garde mutation of the real so accessible it could only be considered pop.

And it is easy for a pop culture facade to hide the avant-gardism of a work of art, because our idea of (high) art has become as alienated and unreachable as academic theory or ancient Greek.

But by coating her avant-gardism with visual accessibility, Madonna does to art what good politicians do to their people: something they can understand.

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