Lady Gaga is a Toilet?!

In celebration of the hangover that you might be nursing today after last night's irish debauchery, I thought that this topic would be relevant. Last week, Lady Gaga performed a set at SXSW (South by Southwest) where she invited vomit artist, Millie Brown to treat her as a living canvas.

For those of you who don't know Millie Brown, she is famous for drinking dyed milk and then vomiting it onto canvas in an attempt to create Pollock-esque pieces.

The process to achieve these pieces also includes the artist starving herself for two days as to ensure all that comes up is the colored milk. Fuck the Atkins diet.

While whether or not this is art is debatable (it's not art), Lady Gaga decided to take the sickening nature of this form to new heights in her performance of "Swine."

*WARNING* This video contains graphic images and if you are made queasy by the sight of people vomiting then don't watch. *WARNING*



But really, what the fuck? How did we end up here, Gaga? I know she's an artist who tries to push the envelope and get people talking, which she always succeeds at doing, but is this how you want to stay relevant? I get that the song is about a perversion of youth and a willingness to do anything for art, but I think there are tons of other ways she could have gone about accomplishing the message. Artistic messages only work when people can understand the language. If you are trying to say something with your art then you have to be sure people are getting it. The problem that a lot of "shock art" has is that it is so jarring that the public is mortified instead of being forced to think about the meaning. All anybody saw in this performance was either an homage to "Two Girls One Cup" or a promotion of eating disorders, neither of which were the intent, I'm sure.

There are times when I have hope for Gaga. I recently listened to an interview she did on Howard Stern, and for almost two hours she talked as someone who was self-reflective, mature, and completely in control of what she was doing with herself and her career. But then moments like this strike and I'm left wondering if the desperation to stay in the spotlight has overridden her sense of self-worth. I remember back in the earlier days of her career we used to get high fashion mixed with storytelling. Her VMA performance of "Paparazzi" still remains as my favorite televised music performance because I think it successfully merged shock art with a message that couldn't be missed. I can't say the same for this performance.

So right now the world is talking all sorts of things about this performance, but most don't seem to be getting anything out of it anywhere near the realm of where I'm hoping Gaga intended. What are your thoughts?