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The meat dress attracted attention at a time when Gaga's very unpredictability had begun to seem predictable, when her constant innovation had threatened to drag. Some of the writers and commentators I spoke to for this piece – many of whom love her – professed that they'd nevertheless become slightly weary of the newness, of the fact that every day Gaga would wear something, say something, do something that seemed primed to provoke a blog, an article, a comment. Shock will eat itself. And then, most of those same writers laughed and admitted the irony. None could name any other major pop star, or pop culture personality right now, who they could say the same about – any other artist who could stand accused on the grounds that they were just too impossibly inventive.
Gaga's latest outfit broke through that torpor, and revived questions that have circulated since she first appeared in the charts just two years ago. Who is the 24-year-old pop star formerly known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta? Is she a brilliant performance artist – or an empty provocateur? Is she driven by ideas, or neediness? Is she a feminist icon, or just a slightly offbeat sex object? Is she an important, influential artist who will endure – or another derivative desperado?
Camille Paglia has already been to work on some of these questions in a piece in the Sunday Times last weekend. It wasn't positive. She called Gaga a "ruthless recycler of other people's work", and suggested there was an "essential depressiveness and spiritual paralysis" about her. She compared her negatively with David Bowie, Madonna, Marlene Dietrich and Elton John. And what seemed to irk her most was what she considers Gaga's fundamental lack of sex appeal. "Gaga isn't sexy at all," she wrote. "She's like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? . . . Marlene and Madonna gave the impression, true or false, of being pansexual. Gaga, for all her writhing and posturing, is asexual."