Lady Gaga – The Fame Monster

The hypermodel before me sticks her arm out a couple feet to take what must be an immaculately captured self-portrait that’d put Van Gogh’s to shame. In doing so, she reveals her pronounced wristbones, bony arms, pale and sunken pits, textbook indicators of poor nourishment. Years of practice have beaten much of the need to stereotype out of my chimp brain, but turns out the cliché about hypermodels might well be true here.

Wasn’t earless Vincent just as narcissistic as the pouting woman before me when he spent an age painting portrait after portrait of himself? In fact, isn’t it a lot less narcissistic to just take a burst of photos of yourself? I mean, painting needs investment, oil painting in particular. You have to take time out of your busy schedule. Days. Weeks. Months even, of getting each crease, each furrow, each wrinkle of your own face just right. Sounds a lot more like an obsession than the capturing of a selfie. Yet it’s the hypermodel in front of me that society calls a narcissist, my generation that’s considered self-obsessed. But that old grey men is a genius? 

What a society chooses to idolise is what a society aspires to be.