On Black Friday, 2013

I notice a kind of self-contentment forming around having the privilege to avoid Black Friday shopping. Before you find comfort in your status for being able to avoid it, think on what compels the rest of us to participate: (1) low cost, (2) a desire to participate in the good life promoted through various circulated media means.

Are the shoppers, then, those who we should really be lampooning, criticizing or distancing ourselves from then? But what of those who encourage, stoke and stir people to want such objects and those who disproportionately create economic conditions which force us to compete with one another and treat each other with such little regard? How are they implicated? I will let you decide.

Gaga on the Artist and the Critic; Whose Want and Whose Body?

Invoking terms like 'racy,' 'sexy,' and otherwise, many commentators are showing their comfort with some of the simplistic, cliched judgments of Gaga and her performances in general and of hers at the AMAs in particular.

But if you actually watch the performance to the end, you're exposed to a completely different sense of what she means by 'body.' On stage, immense monoliths of newspaper articles with various critical headlines appear, surrounding and towering over her. This is the body to which her duet with R Kelly really refers, and while she is willing to show her artistic acknowledgment of our need to conceive of words metaphorically, she also shows her recognition for our tendency to sexualize but also of seeing sexualization as a negative or inherently problematic or polarizing act.

Saying something is sexualized has become akin to saying it is something forbidden, sinful and problematic. So while she is decries this entrenched tendency to use moral prescriptions to stigmatize and polarize, she is also commenting on the kind of body that is a body of work, a public image, what it is that people know about us and feel it is their right to make judgments about. In her performance, she anticipates the base criticisms of her public critics (her interlocutors), deftly pillorying them for the unthought negative and moralizing judgments about her work

And so, while album reviewers drone on and on about how simplistic and sexual her songs are, playing into a longstanding prejudices against certain objects of low culture and into sex-negative conceptions, they're entirely missing the subtext of what may be inferred when gaga entreats us to "Do What You Want With My Body." She knows they will criticize and judge her, drawing on discourses of sexualization. But I wonder: whose body is being used by whom?

Another interpretation abides: she actively parodies and indicts the careless and hurtful manner in which public debate about certain figures has been conducted, decrying the problematic relationship that has developed between the artist and the critic.

So while her commentators continue to read sexualization into her self-presentations and work, they fail to check their own sexist tendencies and acknowledge the steep barriers to recognition female performers experience.

And so I ask: Why are all the judgments being made about Gaga those that have to do with how racy or lewd or profane she or her performances were? What about the elaborate displays, the impressive costume design, the apparently-simplistic lyrics and music that in their own way disclose profound commentaries on the nature of the pop star and their relationship to their public and to the notion of the image?

Nope, various critics would rather indict than celebrate her, and this is their act that they must take responsibility for in perpetuating the stereotypes and interpretations that she labors to challenge in her own work.