Gaga For Gaga – We’ve Seen It All Before, So Why Do We Love Her So?

Posted: November 20th, 2011 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: art, other stuff | Tags: artists, celebrities, lady gaga, madonna, music, performance art, popular culture

What to make of Lady Gaga?  She has managed to position herself so front and center in popular culture, that the question has to be asked.  I have been inclined to think of her as Madonna on steroids.  Lady Gaga herself is quoted as saying in a Rolling Stone interview, “I don’t want to sound presumptuous, but I’ve made it my goal to revolutionize pop music. The last revolution was launched by Madonna 25 years ago.”  Everyone compares her to Madonna, and so the Madonna comparison begins to sound too facile.  And I certainly don’t think she has revolutionized pop music.  Her pop music isn’t much.  It’s catchy, but essentially is Madonna reprocessed, which is not at all revolutionary the second time around.

My alternate take has been to see her not as a musician so much as a performance artist, and really a quite brilliant performance artist.  She’s much more about the persona, the challenge, the discomfort and the shock value than she is about the music.  The music we’ve heard before.  She’s Madonna meets Karen Finley.  In a clever article in the New York Times entitled “If It Involves Performing, Does That Make It Art?”, Ken Johnson suggested a definition for performance art:   “the term … we give to a real-time event that is too weird to be called anything else”.  Awesome, no?  The definition does kind of cover Lady Gaga.  As amusing as the definition is, however, I’m not sure I’m willing to accept it.  I’d like to think that performance art is more directed than that, that it’s saying something.  That may seem a little forced.  Does art have to say something?  I’d argue that no, it doesn’t, and yet somehow I think performance art – at least performance art that’s any good – does.  In a 2002 post about Karen Finley, Chris Boyd wrote:

“Chocolate, yams, eggs, dog food… you name it, she’s applied it (to her body) with soft toys. Finley is on her way to Melbourne to wallow in some honey. But be warned! She’s no high-class mud-wrestler. She’s a champion of free speech whose shows tell horror stories of what it’s like to be marginal in a white, male, capitalist world; what it’s like to be gay or black or HIV-positive… or, worst of all, female!”

Ah, there’s a good performance artist for you.  All about politics an feminism through highly bizarre behavior that shocks and provokes audiences (or certainly did when I first saw Karen Finley perform in the late 80s and cover her naked body with chocolate).*  It seems to me that what’s notable about Lady Gaga is not how much she shocks audiences, but how much, really, she doesn’t.

At the end of the day, Lady Gaga is [Madonna + Karen Finley + an Alexander McQueen runway show (+ Prince + David Bowie + Queen + Donatella Versace ...)] sitting in the audience at the VMA awards as if it were the most normal thing in the world.  When Madonna did it, you knew who Madonna was – rather predictably rebelling against a Catholic upbringing.  But who on earth is Lady Gaga?  All of it is recycled from someone else’s story.    The brilliance in it, then, is not the music or the crazy outfits, but the way she has been able to convince us she’s being shocking and original while she is being absolutely commercial and derivative.  Should it really come as any surprise that she has a collaboration with Barney’s coming up for the holidays?  Yup, Gaga’s Workshop. Opening tomorrow at 11:59 pm, and remaining open through January 2, Gaga’s Workshop will take over an entire floor of the Barney’s flagship store in Manhattan.  The space will be decorated to the max, in true Gaga kitsch fashion, and will offer candy, books, jewelry, beauty items, all based on Lady Gaga’s image, her music and her likes.  If you can’t make it to New York, you can find many of the products online at the Gaga’s Workshop microsite.  Everything about her is for sale, and yet it’s also all facade.

At Europride, in response to questions about her committment to issues of gay pride, Lady Gaga said to her audience,”Why is this question, why is this issue so important? My answer is: I am a child of diversity, I am one with my generation, I feel a moral obligation as a woman, or a man, to exercise my revolutionary potential and make the world a better place.” She then joked: “On a gay scale from 1 to 10, I’m a Judy Garland fucking 42.”  She is brilliantly ridiculous.  Ok, really, derivative or not, you’ve gotta kind of love her.

*For more on Karen Finley, visit — among other places — the post in the TMA Review Archives.

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