As Kottke notes, Vanessa Grigoriadis’s New York profile of Lady Gaga is an embarrassment of quotable riches. I thought that this observation was particularly striking:
Gaga also throws in our face something we’ve known all along but numbly decided to ignore: American celebrities have become very, very boring. … One of her essential points is that celebrity should be the province of weirdos, like Grace Jones circa Jean-Paul Goude and her pet idol, eighties opera–meets–New Wave cult figure Klaus Nomi, who died of AIDS at 39.
I read this and immediately thought of US Magazine’s regular section, “Celebrities … They’re Just like Us,” which features photographs of stars taking their kids for walks and picking up groceries in sweatshirts. But, of course, these so-called “candid” shots are just as artificial as Lady Gaga’s lobster hat.