Gaga-ism: Avant-garde or Evil?

True artists have got an amazing way of reinventing art forms which have become old and boring. It doesn’t matter what the medium of art may be, if its art it will keep on changing. The best artists will be the ones initiating the change. The fore-front of artistic change and the challenging of norms and what is considered “acceptable” is called the Avant-garde.

Now let’s consider Lady Gaga in this light. When Gaga first crashed onto the music scene her record labels thought that she might be too “racy", "dance-orientated" and "underground" for the mainstream music market. She responded that “this is what’s next” in musical performance. It seems she may have been right. She has since become one of the most commercially successful musical artists of her time. In the technical sense of the term then we will have to admit that Lady Gaga is a pioneer of the avant-garde in her artistic domain. Within the dance/pop music genre she has successfully overturned previously accepted norms. So let’s consider which “norms” she has challenged and is in the process of redefining.

Perhaps the most obviously controversial characteristic of Gaga’s musical performances are how sexually provocative they are. It takes some doing to achieve a “controversial” status in this department considering that the modern trend within the musical genre has already normalised sexually provocative performance. Be that as it may, Gaga has raised controversy over her provocative performances in her music videos and in her revealing outfits. In fact, Gaga only began to make a musical break into the industry when she began to incorporate her “burlesque” dance style into her onstage performances. Perhaps as a part of her highly stylised, sexually provocative image, her bi-sexual tendencies are well reported .

Another controversial stylistic choice of Gaga is her penchant for incorporating blood and messy gore into her shows. She has frequently made use of artificial blood onstage and is now written into infamy for her “meat-dress”. She seems preoccupied with getting the same kind of reaction from her audience that a car-wreck might evoke from passers-by, a kind of morbid fascination. This also plays well into the dark image which she has fashioned for herself, the kind of “bride of Satan” reputation which she has fostered.

Being raised in a Catholic school has given Gaga insight into some of the more touchy doctrines of Christianity. She has liberally exploited this knowledge to toy with religious taboos in her music videos and in her song lyrics. This irreverence has provoked a very predictable outrage from the religious sectors of society.

So the consequence of Gaga’s very deliberate stylistic choices is that, within her artistic field at least, death, darkness, gore and sexual promiscuity are trending right now. It would be a very reasonable for someone to respond to the squirmish onlooker, ‘Of course she makes you feel uncomfortable, that is what a good artist is supposed to do!’ Fair enough. But is it evil? Is her “artistic style” masking a more sinister moral degradation?

Yes. Yes of course it is. It is no coincidence that Satan is called the “Prince of Darkness”, that his goal is to “steal, kill and destroy”. It is no coincidence that Gaga’s choices in style appeal to all the sinful vices that humanity has forever been enticed by. Let us not be disconcerted when her defenders retort that ‘it’s not real’, ‘she is not really a Satanist’, ‘its just her onstage persona’, ‘its just her artistic expression.’ We must not be so naïve. Art is a medium of expression, sure, but what is the artist trying to express? Is this a message worth listening to and entertaining? I would like to go even further and argue that its not only through Gaga that death, darkness, gore and sexual promiscuity are being more explicitly incorporated into avant-garde stylising.

It seems quite obvious to me that this is an artistic style which is being popularised in film as well. I am not at any loss to think of a few examples to illustrate my point: Harry Potter, Twilight and even a couple of the latest super hero films are very “dark”(to name but a few). Listening to post-viewing commentary is very revealing of popular film watching culture, even amongst Christians. The Dark Knight was a film which I thought was a great litmus test. It was greeted with huge critical acclaim by film critics and the rest of us arm-chair critics, but why? Why was this film regarded as such a stroke of artistic genius? I would argue that, again, it was because it challenged the norm, it over-turned what we would expect from a comic book movie.

Art critics will tell you that it was the script, or the dialogue, or the outstanding acting performances which made The Dark Knight film avant-garde. I agree that in all of these attributes it was technically brilliant, and for that I applaud the movie makers, but it was more than that. I maintain that it was regarded as artistically brilliant because it was darker (hence the name), more violent, more disturbing, more morally ambiguous than we would normally expect from this genre. I have heard all the defences of this “darker” cinematic style but I think there is a more devious design that we must be aware of as Christians. Let us not naively applaud art which celebrates moral ambiguity or glamorises explicit violence and gore in the name of “authentic realism”. We must carefully discern what is being challenged in the name of the avant-garde, is it artistic norms or moral and ethical standards? As Christians we should stand on the firm conviction that moral and ethical standards need never be “re-invented”.