While chronicling the production of the then-largest issue of “Vogue” ever printed for his 2009 film “The September Issue,” documentarian R.J. Cutler captured the late, great André Leon Talley begging for sartorial reprieve. It was fashion week in New York, and the clothes hitting the runways were drab — plainly tailored and neutral, a far cry from Talley’s preference for eye-catching spectacle. “It’s a famine of beauty,” Talley complained to designer Vera Wang. “A famine of beauty, honey. My eyes are starving for beauty!”
My eyes have felt similarly as of late, wearied and underlined by dark circles after all their hours spent desperately seeking something exquisite. It does not just seem like the world lacks beauty; we can track the active campaign to remove it from our daily lives. Nature is being destroyed, violence rages around the globe and a handful of celebrities just expended innumerable carbon emissions during a two-second space flight for little more than a glorified press opportunity. We’re being inundated with mass amounts of ugliness, and the purveyors of this unsightly deluge want to bury us so deeply that we’ll forget how pleasant the world can be.
In a time when everything is only getting uglier, a striking vision like Gaga’s is critical in proving that beauty is not lost; it’s just harder to find, and her Coachella masterpiece makes our world all the more beautiful just by existing.
Funnily enough, all one had to do to sate this famine was look toward the desert. In the arid, scorching heat of California, an oasis appeared. Except this was no mirage, no pool of crystal blue water with a hammock hanging between two palm trees. It was an opera house, and it was really there, with its baroque moldings and balconies sprawling out atop the Empire Polo Club stage at this year’s Coachella festival. The Parisian-style structure was home to Lady Gaga’s sumptuous headlining stage show, “The Art of Personal Chaos.” For two jaw-dropping hours, Gaga performed a masterclass in modeling pop music into high art, one that surpassed even her most famous live performances and ostentatious world tours.
But the show was not just a career-defining marvel for Gaga; it was a luminescent beacon of hope for the rest of us, shot into the sky among all of the twinkling desert stars and transmitted throughout the globe on a completely free YouTube livestream for anyone to watch. “The Art of Personal Chaos” is Gaga’s answer to the loud, vicious barrage of garbage we’ve been flooded with. Her Coachella set stared down repugnance and pushed against it, radiating so brightly it consumed the darkness, if only for a night. With its live instrumentation, intricate costuming, hundreds of dancers and massive set pieces, the show stands in handcrafted defiance. It demonstrates how impactful original, human-made art can be among the torrent of algorithms, recycled intellectual property and AI-generated rubbish. In a time when everything is only getting uglier and more monotonous, a striking vision like Gaga’s is critical in proving that beauty is not lost; it’s just harder to find, and her Coachella masterpiece makes our world all the more beautiful just by existing.
Lady Gaga performs during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 11, 2025, in Indio, California. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella)The first time Gaga played Coachella in 2017, things were a little different. She was slotted in as a headliner at the last minute after Beyoncé pulled out due to her second pregnancy. Gaga had just two weeks to craft a show worthy of top billing, all while in the middle of her “Joanne” era and getting ready to begin production on her first film, “A Star is Born.” The world was different, too. Donald Trump had only been president for four months and a global pandemic was downright inconceivable, an idea reserved for paranoia thrillers. Ultimately, Gaga put on a great show, but the performance didn’t feel entirely Gaga. There were costume changes and choreographed dance numbers, even an intro where a moving tentacle flailed halfway out of her mouth. Yet, the first “Gagachella” — as fans have dubbed these performances — was unmistakably rushed, far from the astonishing show she’s always prided herself on giving.
Gaga knew expectations for her return would be high. “I’ve had a vision I’ve never been able to fully realize at Coachella for reasons beyond our control,” she wrote in the post announcing her return to the festival. “I have been wanting to go back and to do it right, and I am.” Kudos to Gaga for keeping her cards close to her chest with the understatement of the century. “The Art of Personal Chaos” is not just doing Coachella “right”; it’s a formal exercise in pushing the boundaries of what a stage show can and should be, and the paradigm of how great art reflects the artist as much as it does culture and society.
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To put on a show in this warring world, Gaga calls on the dueling personalities at the core of her new album, “Mayhem,” where she walks the translucent line between her artistry and personhood, and all of the strange chaos conjured by their overlap. She covers her introspection in sticky synths and nasty grooves, and by the end of the record, arrives at a place of contentment, understanding how to be both Lady and Gaga, even if she knows those parts of her will always be at odds.
Like the visuals for the album’s first two singles, “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” the video manifesto that opens her five-act Coachella show brings these dual characters to life. Two Gagas tower over the audience. On the left stands the Mistress of Mayhem, clad entirely in red, speaking with resolution. On the right is an angelic Lady Gaga, dressed in white and reciting the same proclamation in a softer tone. Both entities battle throughout the show, trying to outrun the other or snare her in a deadly trap. To even call it live theater feels crude, even a little dismissive. This is not mere theater, this is an opera: Even if the meaning escapes you in the moment, or its language sounds strange to your ears, its stars convey the intensity and emotion at every turn.
While Gaga herself has a pivotal hand in translating that passion, a show of this magnitude isn’t possible without a small army of collaborators. A series of opening credits tribute the show’s creative director and choreographer, Parris Goebel, as well as its lighting designers, costume designers and camera directors. (With Gaga getting the “directed by” credit, naturally.) But these names don’t just read like a thank-you; they read as a total conviction of spirit. Gaga and her team are so confident that viewers will be blown away that they’ve generously given them the resources to pursue that inspiration after the performance concludes. That’s a prescient thought, given the only intelligible question one can muster once they see Gaga’s 25-foot dress for the opening act is, “How?”
Lady Gaga performs during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 11, 2025, in Indio, California. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella)That dress — which took three weeks of work to build and includes a mechanical lift, steel cage and wooden frame draped in over 270 meters of red curtain fabric — is a marvel of architectural craftsmanship. It’s impressive enough as it stands, but when the skirt opens to reveal a team of dancers inside of it as Gaga transitions from “Bloody Mary” to “Abracadabra,” it seems almost unworldly. Gaga has called “Mayhem” a series of gothic dreams, and in “The Art of Personal Chaos,” she immerses her audience in these fantasies. Like a dream, everything is augmented and intense. Watching it play out is like reading a Brothers Grimm fairytale with all of the pages slightly out of order; a disorienting, riveting way of making the show feel as romantic as it does evil.
Before long, Gaga’s version of her wicked queen sniffs out her prey. After performing most of the first act as the raven-haired Mistress, Gaga ascends to a dance floor lit up like a chess board, competing against her opponent in a lethal, choreographed game. It’s immediately evident that Gaga is in the middle of performing her live opus, a show that may very well come to be recognized as her greatest. But when this colossal chess game ends with the Mistress of Mayhem maiming her adversary, “The Art of Personal Chaos” transitions into something even more extraordinary. What follows exceeds even Gaga’s high standards, entering the echelon of all-time great performance art pieces. But it is not just great; it is glorious, like something that fell from the pop heavens after months upon years of drought.
A swath of dancers carry the Mistress’ victim to an ornate, contained graveyard and bury her in the sand while others freestyle onstage in another live interlude, giving Gaga just enough time for an outfit change. When the lights come back up, Gaga is now the woman in white, lying in the sand, half-dead among piles of discarded human remains. She remains recumbent for an entire number, singing to a skeleton, before the bones around her reveal themselves as dancers in masks, convulsing to the humongous bassline synths of “Disease.” Like the song’s music video, the live number ends with the Mistress reappearing and the two locking into an elaborately choreographed stranglehold.
At its end, Gaga is revived once more for “Paparazzi,” the song that has boasted some of her most unforgettable live performance commentaries — but none quite like this. With help from her dancers, Gaga dons the metallic Mugler armor and crutches featured in the track’s 2009 video for the first time in 16 years. Stuck halfway out of the massive graveyard set piece, Gaga performs the song with more yearning than ever before, her agile voice rising and falling as it cascades across the desperation in her lyrics. In a breathtaking turn, she rises from the opera house’s sandy crypt and slowly moves across the set on crutches, revealing the extent of her billowing, white cape behind her, swelling in the wind of a fan at the end of the stage. When the cameras pan out, they reveal the full scope of this scene. A divine Gaga strapped into couture crutches and lit by soft blue gels and a single spotlight, with her yards-long white cape rising into the air and fanning against the opera house’s florid details. She’s a woman forging forward, undaunted in her relentless pursuit of something wonderful.
When she reaches the fan, Gaga stops momentarily, letting her props fall to the ground. She stands in front of the machine and raises her arms, allowing the romanticism of the image she’s created to linger. For as many times as I’ve seen it, each time feels like the first. Gaga is a through-and-through maximalist, someone who’s always doing just a little too much. That’s why we love her, but that’s also why it makes this performance so singular. For all its dreamy elegance, it’s deceptively simple. Looking at it feels like being stopped in your tracks by a painting in a museum, unable to do anything but admire it for reasons not entirely known to you. It is, and I don’t say this lightly, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen — craft operating on such a high, grand level in a time when it seems like anything that breaks through to the mainstream has had its beauty defaced and defiled. This is art so discerning and resplendent that it makes its spectator feel grateful just to witness it, a reminder that being alive is a cherished gift.
With this show, Gaga has sought not just to infuse beauty into the universe but to remind viewers of how much more gratifying it is to see art made by hand, thought through to the last detail.
These images in Gaga’s show exist in stark opposition to our contemporary era. Now, everything is designed to be ephemeral and disposable, tossed away to make room for the next thing. Technology is eating itself alive, and the “art” that so much of the public chooses to consume is half-baked or, worse, generated by ChatGPT. Over the last month, impressionable users have succumbed to the wiles of insipid computer programs and plastered the (frankly nauseating) results all over social media. ChatGPT studied and lifted the art styles of Pixar and the great director Hayao Miyazaki, allowing users to plug a photo of themselves into the program to transform it into a poor, bastardized regurgitation of something truly beautiful.
But I don’t think most people are being willfully submissive to tech, only that they seek beauty in the wrong places. Social media has created digital silos that have swallowed users whole, demanding that they display their individualism in a way that attracts followers or risk being shunned and alone in electronic hell. When people ask ChatGPT to make them into Studio Ghibli characters or a toy doll with all of their quirky characteristics included as accessories — as was the trend over Gagachella weekend — they are frantically searching for a personal connection to art. People want to see themselves modeled in the images they proliferate because social media has taught them to use individualism as a currency to buy more attention. But by jumping on the bandwagon and feeding the machine, the resulting image loses its novelty; there is no beauty or introspection, certainly no personality. No one made a ChatGPT image with their hands or thought about the most interesting way to present it. And as soon as another fad has replaced the trend, the cycle will repeat.
Lady Gaga performs during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 11, 2025, in Indio, California. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Coachella)But watching Gaga’s “Paparazzi” performance, and the entirety of “The Art of Personal Chaos,” I see someone who has set out to make something completely honest in a world where so many lie to themselves every day just to cope with how quickly the world’s shine has dulled. With this show, she has sought not just to infuse beauty into the universe but to remind viewers of how much more gratifying it is to see art made by hand, thought through to the last detail. The distinctly human touch in this show pierces the soul in a way nothing made solely by algorithmic ones and zeroes ever could. As Gaga tells the audience after “Paparazzi,” warmly lit on a balcony: “I wanted to make a romantic gesture. This year, in these times of mayhem, I decided to make you an opera house in the desert.”
Here, Gaga relays her intentions. The entire show is about duality, yes. But it’s also about art and imagination and how powerful they can be in tempering the waters after we’ve spent so long drowning in the roiling seas of uninspired uniformity. Her intentions with this Coachella show are clear and noble. The set proves that having standards and integrity, even in the face of your oppressors and the ugliness they broadcast, will create something beautiful enough to combat even the most despicable reality. Anything so magnificent is worth fighting for. And though it can never be recreated in exactly the same way, even for Coachella’s upcoming second weekend, it will live on forever. Despite the Mistress of Mayhem’s attempts to snuff it out from the world, beauty finds a way back, reborn even more exceptional because it has survived.
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