Lady Gaga Before the Mirror

Many a time the mirror imprisons them and holds them firmly. Fascinated they stand in front. They are absorbed, separated from reality and alone with their dearest vice, vanity.

—Rrose Sélavy (aka Marcel Duchamp), “Men Before the Mirror”

Though I’ve long since stopped tuning into MTV’s Video Music Awards, when someone told me that Lady Gaga opened this year’s show with the introduction of a male alter-ego named Jo, I was curious enough to call up the clip on the internet. Sure enough, there (s)he was, sporting a black pompadour and a bound chest. Jo’s eight-minute performance included a five-minute monologue about—who else?—Lady Gaga; Jo played the part of the spurned lover, smoking furiously and beating his chest.

In her recent MTV promo, Lady Gaga (née Stefani Germanotta) says: “I really believe that art is this huge lie … we sing it and we dance and we dress it every day, and me and my friends all hope that someday we tell it enough that it becomes true.” With its black-and-white palette and close-ups of musicians, one can almost be forgiven for forgetting that the spot is an advertisement for something so crude and commercial as the Video Music Awards. Lady Gaga would like to be more than just a pop star; she sees herself and has encouraged others to see her as something of a performance artist. (By invoking her “friends” in the MTV spot, she even suggests the existence of an avant-garde coterie à la the New York School.) By donning the mantle of Art (note the capital 'A'), she has gained permission to do things and to say things that other popular performers would not do or say—their careers could not survive it. Though her audiences often appear embarrassed for her—this was surely the case at Sunday’s VMA’s—she survives to sing another song because she is vested with the authority of the Artist.

This is a clever trick, and she is not alone in deploying it. In the name of Art, James Franco has deigned to educate the masses about the distinction between high and low cultures: how wonderfully postmodern it is to see a “serious” actor play an artist on “General Hospital”! Lady Gaga and James Franco are not content to be mere artists; that is, talented performers in their respective fields. Their narcissism compels them to seek—and if they don’t find, to invent—ever more and elaborate ways to display themselves. It is fitting that Lady Gaga’s most recent incarnation (after all, Lady Gaga is herself an invention) is the lover of Lady Gaga.

For all of their supposed melding of high and low, art and life, what saves these performers is precisely the persistence of these distinctions. Lady Gaga says that she longs for the dissolution of boundaries between art and life, but her career depends on that boundary remaining fixed.