Lady Gaga won’t be wearing any meat this year to the music
awards. No poultry. No Vegetables. This year, “We’re going more with textiles.”
Let’s make our flaws famous. Wear a bra around town. Gain 25 pounds. Lose it.
Wear safety pins. A wig. Another wig. A weave, extensions, short, long, two-tone. Paint your face. Show off your “curvy
figure” your “curvy figure” your “curvy figure” their way of saying you are getting
fat or is that just another outfit. It’s a style. You can wear a helmet of
flowers around your whole head or you can be fat. Does anyone even know you’re
fat if the captions dodn’t mention it under every picture? If you were thin
before 25lbs isn’t fat. You don’t look fat. But curvy is code. Tall shoes short
shoes black dress brown hair blonde bouffant spikey pink and streaked you are
fat because fat is unusual. Let’s make
our flaws famous. Take off the makeup get fat don’t brush your hair wear
yellow underwear. You were born this way. Bullies were born this way too. Be
kind. Be different. Be yourself. Wear what you want. Eat meat. Or don’t. Have a
dog that looks like a baby bear. Dress like a man from the 1950s. Be a woman
and be a man be both or neither or alternate between as your mood changes.
Create a color scheme for each emotional moment. Use geometric design. Wear
hats. Make your hat speak out loud. Encourage the youth. You are a spokesperson
for people to go beyond or go over or go under. Be loud or quiet but do it in your
own way. Wear pants. Or don’t. The trick is to learn to exist “halfway between
fantasy and reality all of the time.” She
completely turns the page on the last decade’s era of bimbodom, taking back the
limelight from women who made their careers by admitting that they had nothing
to say…She closes a strange era in female pop stardom…She’s riveting in any
language, with lyrics that compose their own Esperanto…she’s effortlessly
global. She wants to promote images of as many sexual combinations as are
possible on this Earth…she’s a girl who likes boys who look like girls…she’s a
girl who likes to look like a boy herself—a drag queen, a boy pretending to be
a girl…little gives her more pleasure than the persistent rumor that she is a
hermaphrodite…That’s not Madonna. Madonna wouldn’t pretend she has a penis.
She is pop art, creative design color style experimentation. Creativity is
stupid imaginary free space open to ideas and the outlandish which is only
outlandish because it is unexpected, outside of some mainstream norm which
comes from nowhere in particular or comes from resignation or an easy total
lack of creativity. Splashes of color, swatches of fabric, complex engineering.
She is an art project in process. The art student set free from the boundaries
of the institution. Music color shape shadow nuance re-presentation, the
abstract surreal realist avant-garde installation art in 3D walking through
town shopping on stage talking with Ellen and the asshole Howard Stern. For Warhol, stardom was its own art form,
empty imagistic vividness one of the most important forces. Become the
performance. Art is life. Leave the love behind. Embody the artistic vision. Become
androgyny. Become a drag queen. (Friends
say that she has not been in love since, and the ritualistic killing of male
lovers in her last three videos is related to this breakup.)…It’s an unlikely rise, and an unlikely name,
and a totally unreal image. But what’s reality? Or maybe it’s a better
version of reality or a more open one. This real is pushed to the margins, or it's homogenized,
sanitized, softened making a center into which everyone aspires.
Until they realize what they’ve lost and can’t get back. More real exists on
the margins. More kids are bullied. More art students believe in creative
possibilities…until they leave art school and are out in the world. Little kids
write poems and paint pictures and play dress-up until they are adults
conforming in khakis and conservatism. Women give up on dreams leave their
intuition behind let go of imagination unless it is mainstream-sanctioned
motherhood activities like arts and crafts at the kitchen table. Art is for
non-professional non-adults who have no responsibilities and little ambition.
Until someone wears a shiny red plastic dress and red glitter face paint to
meet the Queen of England and the rest of us turn our un-hatted heads and consider
there may be a different way of doing things. Just maybe the status is not in
quo.
quotes and italics from random People Magazine web
pages on Lady Gaga and from “Growing Up Gaga: The self-invented, manufactured,
accidental, totally on-purpose New York creation of the world’s biggest pop
star.” New York Magazine. By Vanessa Grigoriadis, Published Mar 28, 2010
