Lady Gaga Critique

delayprocrastinate:

Lady Gaga, as Dery demonstrates without really explicitly arguing, sells the promise of outré weirdness without ever being genuinely transgressive or even semiotically coherent. Instead of presenting a series of interlocking propositions of a grand artistic vision, Lady Gaga serves up flat signifiers of superficial ideas—the frisson of the peculiar, disassociated fragments of subcultures (S&M porn, haute performance art, etc.) that would be entirely unpalatable for mainstream Americans if presented more thoroughly. Her shtick is not meant to add up, because then that would actually scare the people she’s trying to woo.

9 pm