Lady Gaga and Amateur Cultural Criticism

Upon release of the 10-plus minute "Telephone" video, featuring Lady Gaga and Beyonce, amateur cultural critics began to recognize and draw attention to the video's various moments of allusion, parody, etc. Articles like this one demonstrate how people of various interests and professional backgrounds have been compelled to "close read" Gaga's video for cultural meaning; and these analyses, deployed with varying degrees of adeptness or incompetence, come off with varying degrees of success.

The phenomenon repeats itself with the launch of Gaga's latest art-house-style video, "Born This Way." MTV chimes in with this and this, a pair of lists attempting to detail all of the video's "allusions." Some are clear, while others seem wholly contrived, over-read. Take this gem from the MTV "Part 2" list:

Michelangelo's "Last Judgment": Massive fresco inside the Sistine Chapel, it depicts the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse. Several readers noticed the similarities between the painting and the "Born This Way" scene where the "evil" child is born, as the souls of humans trapped below rise toward their Mother Monster for judgment.

What's most curious about this behavior is that even though the acts of criticism, reading, hermeneutics, and "cultural analysis" are typically thought to belong to the high-minded and disconnected, and applicable only to "great works" of art and literature, the most puerile pop-cultural medium in existence, MTV, can't help but attempt to draw connections between cultural products in attempts to produce meaning. And they like it. They really, really like it.