Madonna has been slammed for her ‘inappropriate’ tribute to the late Marilyn Monroe after posing in her death bed for a sexually charged photo shoot.
The 63-year-old singer stripped to her underwear and draped herself in fur for an attention grabbing shoot for American fashion magazine V.
The images are said to have been inspired by Bert Stern’s The Last Sitting photoshoot with Marilyn – which was conducted just six weeks before her death at the age of 36 in 1962.
Marilyn’s death was ruled a “probable suicide” at the time as she was found to have traces of drugs in her system which were several times over the lethal limit.
Some fans have reacted negatively to Madonna’s new V Magazine shoot – feeling that it is disrespectful to the memory of Marilyn, and that it could be viewed as “glamorising” suicide.
One fan, taking to Twitter, expressed their opinion, writing: “For some morbid and eerie reason, Madonna decides to re-create Marilyn Monroe’s death bed.”
While another bluntly stated: “Yuck. Gross and inappropriate.”
And another took issue with concept of the shoot, tweeting: “This isn’t cool. Glamorizing suicide is the only takeaway once the shock factor wears off.”
Photographer Steven Klein explained the through process behind the photoshoot in a statement.
He said: “We were not interested in recreating the images exactly but more importantly, we wanted to explore the relationship between photographer and subject.
“Both the friendship and the artistic process, and how art can imitate life and vice versa.”
He continued: “When I sent Madonna the photos, she was really taken by the incandescent fragility of Marilyn at that moment in her life.
“We decided to find a hotel suite and try to capture the liaison between a star and the camera, the mystery, and magic of this creative collaboration.”
Meanwhile, Madge herself has been proudly promoting her photoshoot – sharing snaps from it via her own Instagram feed.
During her interview with the magazine, Madonna hit out at Cancel Culture.
She said: “The thing is the quieter you get, the more fearful you get, the more dangerous anything is. We’re giving it power by shutting the fuck up completely.”
She also opened up about how she refuses to slow down, despite being near retirement age.
Madonna said: “I don’t even think about my age, to tell you the truth. I just keep going. Even when I performed almost my entire tour in agony, I had no cartilage left in my right hip, and everyone kept saying, ‘You gotta stop, you gotta stop.’
“I said, ‘I will not stop. I will go until the wheels fall off.’ And it was COVID that shut us down in Paris when we still had 10 days left of shows and I was going to keep going.
“I didn’t care how much it hurt. But to your point, I don’t ever think about the limitations of time and when I should be stopping.
“I only think about it when extremely ignorant people say to me, ‘Don’t you think you’ve earned the right to just sit back and enjoy all of your success and all things that you’ve achieved and retire?’
“Not retire, no one would dare say that word to me. I say to them, ‘Wait a second. Why do you think I do what I do?’ Why do you do what you do? Do you have a stop date for yourself?”
