The Lady will perform on September 13 at this year's MTV Video Music Awards, and she's planning something big. In an interview with Newsweek's Ramin Setoodeh, she says: "I'm going to be performing one of the most recent singles off my album. But it's going to be a different and more dramatic interpretation. And it is most certainly rooted in New York-style performance art." Setoodeh asks — and who could blame him — "What does that mean?"

Gaga explains:

It's less of me singing the song, and more of an art installation. A performance-art piece. It's very well-designed and thought out, and we've been planning it for months and months. It is for me a very meaningful performance, [for] where I am in my career, as well as the experiences I've had, as well as the co-headlining tour I'm going on in the fall. […] I sort of have this philosophy about things: there's never a reason to do something unless it's going to be memorable, unless it's going to change things, unless it's going to inspire a movement. With the song and with the performance, I hope to say something very grave about fame and the price of it.

Does that clear anything up? Hell no. But even more cryptic is her answer to the question, "what are you going to wear?"

I would say that the fashion for the performance is a representation of the most stoic and memorable martyrs of fame in history. It's intended to be an iconic image that represents people. I think after watching the performance and maybe studying it after you watch it on YouTube, you'll see the references and the symbols come through.

And, when talking about her lighting scheme, Ms. Gaga says: "I like it to be moody. I like it to evoke an idea more than light my face. It's not about what you see. It's about what you don't see, and sometimes that vacant space can be very scary."

Perhaps you find it tiring to hear about her "philosophy," her "art," "symbols" and "meaning." Maybe it would be easier if she just said, "I'm going to dress like Joan of Arc. It's gonna be dope." But the other women topping the chart right now? Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift. Those two aren't exactly… interesting.

Back when that song "Beautiful" was all over the radio, a DJ friend of mine once said, "The devil didn't invent rock and roll for James Blunt." And I can't help but agree, as a woman raised on filthy Prince lyrics, Madonna writhing to "Like A Virgin" (at the VMAs!) and sexual innuendo in George Michael hits. Lots of people can sing. Lots of people write songs. Pop music should be more that that. Not a lot of people sing well, or write catchy songs; Lady Gaga does both. But more importantly: Lady Gaga makes it exciting. Titillating, unexpected. With Muppet coats, teacups, awful (untrue) hermaphrodite rumors and general pantslessness. Without her, pop would be a bland landscape right now. And think about it: People mocked what David Bowie and KISS wore, too. In addition, she uses her Haus of Gaga to "propel" friends and young designers into the spotlight, using her fame to further their careers.

You might think Lady Gaga is pretentious, a phony. But if she is, it's as someone once said of Holly Golightly: She's a real phony… She honestly believes all this phony junk that she believes. Asked, "How old were you when you first wanted to be famous?" Lady Gaga replies:

I think I was in my mother's womb. But it's not about fame, you see. It's about "The Fame." It's about a life of glamour. I believe in a glamorous life.

Lady Gaga Will Rock the VMAs [Newsweek]

Earlier: Questions About The High Fashion & Domestic Violence In Lady GaGa's Video
Before The Teacup & Blonde Wig, Pants Were Still A Problem
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
Lady Gaga Visits The View

In the 90s, Orlan made waves in the art world with what she described as "carnal art" - filming herself receiving a series of plastic surgeries intended to give her the Mona Lisa's forehead, "the chin of Botticelli's Venus, the nose of Gerome's Psyche, the lips of François Boucher's Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting." As a result she is, to say the least, a physically distinctive figure.

Her work has always been controversial; although the 61-year-old defines herself as a feminist artist, she's been criticized for embracing plastic surgery, masculine ideals, and an ethos that seems less about, say, explorations of larger questions of identity, than variations on explorations of Orlan. Of course, she could care less, as is made clear in this interview she gave the Guardian. She embraces narcissism as an artistic necessity, decries a double-standard she feels the intelligentsia applies to the plastic arts and generally expresses that she sees no conflict between self-indulgence and statement, launching a perfume and questioning the body's position in society. Watch it - but be warned, there are a few moments of "carnal art" that the squeamish should avoid.

French Artist Orlan: 'Narcissism Is Important' [Guardian]
Orlan [Official Site]

As Viv Grosken writes for The Guardian:

Under the guise of the Muffia, they started asking questions of their own. Why don't we resent the way the media portrays women? Does no one care that women are mutilating themselves with cosmetic surgery? Why do so few young women know what feminism is?

They started out dressing up to look like the beauty stereotype they decry, and then flashing hairy armpits or their merkins to freak out the folks that are staring; they also dressed up once like construction workers and scratched their balls while heckling men. But their more standard routine goes something like this.

Dressed as the Muffia, they usually stand in the street writing messages on each other's body stockings, such as "Lose a few pounds" and "Eating disorders or a society of disordered eating?" O'Brien explains that their aim is "to use our bodies on the street to generate ideas and engage with people." To this end, O'Brien also once staged a one-woman performance outside Topshop, mixing up a pink concoction and then vomiting it into a bucket, to protest against the prominence of ultra-thin models.

Sometimes, they help people think about feminism and beauty standards while other performances are watched by men that are happy to ogle a couple of attractive women in body stockings. But they say they're not particularly focused on that aspect of it.

Most of all, they want to enjoy themselves. "I feel really liberated by flashing my merkin," laughs King.

Meet The Muffia [The Guardian]

Related: The Muffia

We've all met young men and women like Aliza Shvarts: They come from relatively happy, upper-middle-class families, and are so desperate to be "edgy" and "crazy" that they perform a series of stunts — whether through drug experimentation, sexual exploration, or bad performance art — to differentiate themselves from their hopelessly bourgie peers and parents. The problem with Shvarts' little art project, however, is that her need to rebel has potentially big ramifications outside her ivory tower of academia. (One assumes that Shvarts used, at least in part, the abortifacient RU-486, a prescription-only drug that some politicians want added to the list of Schedule I controlled substances.) Plus, conservative bloggers are already up in arms and using Aliza's capriciousness to support their anti-abortion agendas. (At 9:00am this morning Shvarts' name had 53 hits on Google; as of 11:52am, it had 291.) And though the Buckley School valedictorian claims that she wants her piece to be a medium for "politics and ideologies," it's not like she's shedding light on an obscure subject. People debate the ethics of abortion constantly, and possibly harming your body by forcing it to miscarry repeatedly? Yeah, that's not helping the discourse.

Molly Clark-Barol, a Yale student and commenter on the YDH's website, sums up Shvarts's egocentrism better than I could: "Congratulations, Aliza Shvarts '08: you have single-handedly trivialized not only an entire generation and a half's fight to gain and retain the right to choose, through harassment and against massive odds, but also history of women's struggles, not only politically, but with the emotional, moral, and spiritual impacts of the choice to terminate a pregnancy. You also spit upon every couple who has tried, and failed, sometimes repeatedly, to have children. it is the emotional impact of these struggles, emotional impact that you shamelessly exploit, not explore, in your senior project."

[Image via Soapbox Event]

Related: Absolutely Fascinating [Bitch, PhD]