Abstract
Abstract: 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 a notion also lies at the heart of Don DeLillo’s novel, The Body Artist. Through the lens of the grieving body artist, Lauren Hartke, DeLillo interrogates body art as a productive, yet potentially commodifying means of renewal whereby corporeal suffering is reduced to a plethora of aestheticized crossings. Examining DeLillo’s novel in combination with Gaga’s performance art, I argue that such crossings constitute what Jean Baudrillard calls, in his essay “Transaesthetics,” “a [postmodern] materialization of aesthetics where … art mime[s] its own disappearance,” but also expose the complex dystopias underpinning America’s bad romance with its own renewal.
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