Knowing it's a game from within.

"My ideas about fame and art are not brand new," she says. "We could watch Paris is Burning [Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary about New York drag artists], we could read The Warhol Diaries, we could go to a party in New York in 1973 and these same things would be being talked about. I guess you could say that I'm a bit of a Warholian copycat. Some people say everything [in music and fashion] has been done before, and to an extent they are right. I think the trick is to honour your vision and reference and put together things that have never been put together before. I like to be unpredictable, and I think it's very unpredictable to promote pop music as a highbrow medium."

"It's not parody, it's commentary," Gaga replies coolly. "To use the words 'have your cake and eat it' implies something devious. For me, I just think I'm very good at what I do."
----Lady Gaga


I will admit, I have an enormous crush on Lady Gaga. Why you may ask...why would be be so enamored with this pop dance princess who looks really superficial, is all tattooed up and has a mighty peppery past? I like her because she was accepted to Julliard at eleven years old. I like how she went to NYU's Tisch school of the arts at 17 and decided to drop out because she was not getting a real arts experience. That and she can sing...listen to the stripped down stuff and it is far more obvious what I mean.

Beyond this, she sees the game that it all is. She sees that it is about the persona, about the art as art and art within culture itself. She knows the rules of the game from within the game itself. That is very rare. Most people who become stars, no matter who they are fall into the idea that they can separate what they do from what they are. She on the other hand embraces it. Perhaps that is some Christian notion of honesty/ integrity (you talk to the talk so you have to walk the walk), but I hate to fall into that kind of analysis. It seems that she understands the heritage of her art, the whole visual package, the rhetoric that goes along with it.

That is really unexpected from a 23 year old pop princess, eh? I think we estimate people though.