ABSTRACT
“Theatricality” was the title of the 20th episode of the television series Glee, which premiered in 2010, and featured its female club members paying homage to Lady Gaga. The Glee cast performed in a selection of Mother Monster’s costumes, including her Haus of Gaga bubble dress, the Armani prive orbit dress she wore to the 52nd Grammy Awards, and a knock–off of the dress she wore to meet Elizabeth II. That Lady Gaga and her wardrobe should be the inspiration for an episode about the pleasures of over-the-top, fake ontologies—an episode watched by 11.5 million 18 to 49 year-old Americans, securing a 4.8 Nielson rating—(Russell and Cohn 2012, 5–7) affirms pop culture’s valorization of the illusory, embracing a concept of theatricality as irrepressible, subversive. Lady Gaga’s “Meat Dress,” made of flank steak, and worn at the MTV Video Awards that same year—an idea whose initial provenance was most likely Canadian sculptor Jana Sterback’s Vanitas: Fresh Dress for an Albino Anorexic (1987) and more recently seen in Chinese artist Zhang Huan’s My New York (2002)—also spoofs the myth of authenticity and originality.
