Gaga Aesthetics: Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and the Up-Ending of Tradition

Pop art has been traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture, because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the "low" into the "high". The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term "Gaga Aesthetics" characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa.

Taking Adorno and Horkheimer's The Culture Industry as a crucial departure point, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics as well as those in his wake, such as Arthur Danto and Donald Kuspit. This book considers the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, and the extent to which Adorno's aesthetics may still have valency at a time when high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is "Gaga Aesthetics", aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where "fine art" is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno's concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples ranging from Madonna's Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion in the culture industry.