Performances by Lady Gaga, particularly her music video Bad romance, exemplify postmodern America’s preoccupation with spectacle. They expose how the gaze, as a public-driven or self-imposed zone of terror and destruction, inscribes potentialities of renewal, wherein the subject’s authenticity is reasserted through the very process of commodification, or a kind of singeing of the image.
Such crossings constitute what Baudrillard calls “a [postmodern] materialization of aesthetics where…art mime[s] its own disappearance”; they also expose the complex dystopias underpinning America’s bad romance with its own renewal.
This according to “Doing the Lady Gaga dance: Postmodern transaesthetics and the art of spectacle in Don DeLillo’s The body artist” by Pavlina Radia (Canadian review of American studies XLIV/2 [summer 2014] pp. 194–213).
Today is Lady Gaga’s 30th birthday! Below, the video in question.
