VIDEO REVIEW : Madonna: The Dr. Ruth of Video Auteurs? : Pop music: The message of her latest effort--it’s OK to imagine kinky things--is quite traditional.

Does “Justify My Love” justify the hype? Was it created solely to get attention through its mildly shocking images of sadomasochism, androgyny, homosexuality and briefly exposed nipples, or, as Madonna suggests, to make a positive statement about fantasy role-playing in sex?

Trying to determine whether anything Madonna does is an honest artistic expression or a calculated attempt to titillate is by now an artificial distinction. Each new, successful attempt to grab hold of the jaded public imagination is a masterpiece of the seller’s art.

But if “Justify” is indeed provocative within the realm of rock video and MTV, it’s a whole lot less so taken out into the bigger world of ideas. (Or, for that matter, taken into the more permissive world of home video, where this short clip is overpriced to sell starting Thursday--at $9.98 on Warner Reprise Home Video.)

The message is surprisingly traditional, at least for anyone who’s ever read any post-Masters and Johnson self-help books, or seen George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex”: How better to enjoy monogamy than through fantasies of promiscuity? If Madonna is merely saying that it’s OK to imagine kinky things during sex, as long as you don’t actually attempt to act them all out, does this make her less a Bertolucci wanna-be and more just the Dr. Ruth of video auteurs?

The hotel where Madonna meets boyfriend Tony Ward for a quick tryst is a little like the Overlook at the end of “The Shining”--empty, but full of quickly glimpsed specters doing very naughty things. The talented director Jean Baptiste Mondino (who previously directed Madonna’s best video, the equally sexual but more substantive “Open Your Heart”) might have had more of a field day with the spooky aspects of all these black-and-white fantasy voyeurs.

But Madonna herself keeps getting in the way--opening her raincoat to caress her own garter-clad thighs before she’s even out of the hallway, treating us to close-ups of her bumping-and-grinding derriere once we’re inside the room, and so on.

And the imaginary sexual outlaws gathered around--in drag, painted-on mustaches, leather and lipstick--start to look like just so many extras from “Cruising.” As fantasies go, this is pretty old-hat . . . or old-policeman’s-cap, to carry out the dominatrix motif.

After it’s all over, Madonna modestly covers herself and giggles back down the hallway whence she came, while a printed message over the final freeze-frame of her glowing face reads: “Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.” That might sound good to the self-reliant generation, but if solo satisfaction is the ultimate sexual high, then what’s “love”--justified or otherwise--got to do with it?