Sleeping with Gaga

From the web site HYPERALLERGIC

 http://hyperallergic.com/

Lady Gaga hosted the last big party of fashion week on September 14 by creating “Sleeping With Gaga,” a performance that has uncomfortable similarities with Canadian-Ukranian artist Taras Polataiko’s recent Sleeping Beauty. After drawing a lot of international press and attention, his modern-day fairytale closed at the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kiev on September 9, five days before her one-night-only performance took place at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Fairytales are continually updated to comment on the current times. Gaga used “Sleeping Beauty” to discuss the state of celebrity in the internet age, whereas Polataiko commented not only on the political state of “sleeping” Ukraine post–Orange Revolution but also on the possibilities of a queered fairytale.

I’m not so sure that Tara Polataiko has a monopoly on re-enacting Sleeping Beauty, especially since it’s a logical move for installation art to put a real-life Sleeping Beauty on display.  Polataiko’s Sleeping Beauty stands in a long tradition of cocooned women, swathed in white, looking like beautiful corpses.  Gaga, by contrast, looks more like those wonderful 19th century odalisques, and she goes for the voluptuous look, inviting viewers to touch her through the faux bottled perfume portal.  Is this really the first black perfume, as ads claim for a scent that is “black like the soul of fame, but invisible once airborn.”  Who knew?