Everyone loves Lady Gaga now. God, you’d be a monster not to. (Not a monster as Gagapedia defines it, but rather in the classical sense of the word—heartless, wicked creature.) Just look at this video of her leaning over Liza Minnelli at the 2022 Oscars, all red lipstick and soft waves of platinum blond. Paying heart-tugging homage to the giants of showbiz who came before her. Murmuring “I got you” as Minnelli fumbles with the envelope. Just look at the comments: “Lady Gaga is such a class act, but she’s not acting, she’s the real deal!” “Lady Gaga handled this like a true professional.” “Lady Gaga showed such grace and class.” Demure, poised, professional: a star was truly born.
Blasphemy! Can I ask how we got here? Like, forgive me for being born in 2000 and having my first memories of Gaga be the Weird Al parody we all chanted at recess: “I’m sure my critics will say it’s a grotesque display / Well they can bite me, baby—I perform this way!” Forgive us all for the delighted shiver that went up our ten-year-old spines as we passed around the pictures in computer lab free time: Gaga enrobed in head-to-toe human hair. Gaga with fireworks shooting from her tits. Gaga at the 2010 VMAs, dripping in raw meat, fat-marbled cuts of flank state clinging to her hips. She accepts her award for Bad Romance, and her mouth, even then wearing that bright red lipstick, splits into a smile equal parts delighted and eerie. Old Hollywood decorum reads as more uncanny when you’re clad in cold flesh, and Gaga knew it then, knows it still, I’m sure.
In April of this year, four corrugated plastic signs popped up around Yale University’s campus advertising an exhibition of the meat dress at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. THE MEAT DRESS, the signs read, in university-trademarked serif font. A RAW LOOK. The Beinecke —frequently misspelled—is a kind of squat space-age marble cube whose claim to fame is that it has no windows. The marble panes are just thin enough to let in light, while filtering out any harsh glare that might disintegrate a manuscript’s pages. And every so often, it does in fact host special exhibits. The Beinecke is beautiful, and bizarre, and perhaps the best embodiment of Alan Bennett’s warning not to “confuse learning with the smell of cold stone.”
No evidence ever appeared that the meat dress was in the Beinecke. But listen, it was a great prank. And it’s a fucking great visual: a ten-year cut of infamous meat suspended in a stone cube, to be marvelled at but not eaten or touched. The ten-year-old whorls of fat marbled through the flank steak. The elevation of Gaga’s cultural impact to the status of the Gutenberg Bible, lauding her wardrobe as a capital-t-Text, a metacommentary on the murderous consequences of fame.
If you tell a lie enough times, it becomes an incantation. I think about the rumour, fuelled by campus tour guides, that if a fire starts at the Beinecke, the oxygen is automatically sucked from the building. This stifles the flame, saves the books, and kills everyone inside. Visitors and current students alike thrill at the idea that anything could be worth that brutal a snuffing-out of human breath. The hypothesis of your own sacrifice for the love of the Gutenberg Bible, or an ancient Norse map recently exposed as a twentieth-century fake, or the collection of pulp sissy porn I photographed for a final paper last spring, or whatever else. Lux et veritas, light and truth. Dying for the sake of the little light that makes it through the marble walls, and the even littler truth that gets out.
The Beinecke Library does not actually have a contingency plan to suffocate its own workers. This does not actually matter. The university, in the chilling permanence of its stolen stone, is made possible by killing anyhow.
The Beinecke Library has never housed Lady Gaga’s meat dress. Again, the fact of this is irrelevant. The real meat dress lies preserved and displayed at the Haus of Gaga on the Las Vegas Strip. Taxidermist Sergio Vigilato was paid $6,000 by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to defrost the dress, chemically treat it to kill bacteria, and turn it into a kind of jerky before repainting the browned flesh in its original bright red. 2010’s Gaga lives on, ossified without bone, like a sloughed-out second skin.
It’s compelling. Our beloved Liza Minnelis and Stefani Germanottas come and go, but this flesh will last forever, or until the destruction of Las Vegas—whichever comes first. The process of preservation renders the flank steaks bloodless so that their meat might endure. This is the problem I keep coming back to: in rendering a thing eternal, timeless, iconic, how much of its original shock horror is lost? How much is the skin emptied out? How much do our beloved cultural products echo Jordy Rosenberg’s description of an ancient, recently renovated campus library, blossoming “into the spectacular, vacant anomie of an insurance tower in a second-rate city.”
Lady Gaga’s best contribution to the culture remains her 2009 VMAs rendition of Paparazzi. It’s archived on Youtube, as all things are, and comments below muse about how she changed the game, was ahead of her time, how 2009 just wasn’t ready for this. Iconic. Onscreen, she staggers across the stage, her voice climbing into an increasingly frenzied minor key, I’m your biggest fan, I’ll follow you until you love me, and blood spills from her midriff, and her mouth distends in a wail, and she is hoisted by her arm until she is suspended, bloodied, from the stage, and her body goes stiff. It’s said that some audience members briefly thought she died that night, while others broke out in applause.
It’s a spectacle that implicates the viewer, then as much as now. You have killed me, her vacant stare accuses the audience, and I have let you. Remember, enchanted fan, smitten paparazzi, that this fame is only made possible by killing. Remember Britney, and Lindsay, and the violence of the library, and the preserved corpses of mummies laid out under glass cases, doomed to unrest.
To be clear, I don’t want to over-equate anything. Lady Gaga is a millionaire replete with money and power; the communities plundered by Ivy League museums are decidedly neither of these things. But there’s something to be said for how inherently bizarre it is to stop something cold in your preservation of it. Remember how badly archivists and tabloids alike want to see a body, and how little they care about how it might have arrived there.