Did She Really Pee in Champagne Bucket as Performance Art

After walking between ranks of bare-chested men wearing tight leather pants and shoulder harnesses, you are standing in the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum in
Manhattan, and Lady Gaga is sleeping on a black velvet divan inside a giant perfume bottle set on a stage. French music is playing. Masked people are walking up
onto the stage, sticking their hands through a hole and caressing Lady Gaga’s hand.
No, this is not a surreal dream—it’s a launch event for the fragrance Lady Gaga Fame. For an hour, basically every one of the hundreds at the party is free to
touch her hand as she sleeps.
Prior to this, a short film, part of the campaign, made its debut. Directed by Steven Klein, the movie features Gaga in various positions, like underwater, crab-
walking; lying on her side, naked; wearing black latex; writhing around in black goop; having scantily clad men crawl all over her; and lots and lots of black ooze.
VF Daily caught up with Klein in the crowd, and he explained the film’s premise. “It’s the idea of the pleasures and pain of fame, and the temptation of fame.
What is it like to embark on the journey of fame, and what are the costs of fame?”
The famed fashion photographer also explained Gaga’s Sleeping Beauty performance. “Everybody wants a piece of fame,” he said. “It’s simple. Everybody wants a
piece of fame, so it’s like, in the end, what do they really want? They don’t really know. But unless they touch her, they’re not really satisfied.”
The invitation called for black-tie masquerade. Recommended headwear was “mask, hat, tiara, crown or lobster.” There was a creative display on hand, everything
from a Warhol lookalike, complete with silver wig, to model Jessica Stam in a knockout evening dress.
Some creative types had to scramble to put together a look. “I just put it together very quickly. I didn’t even realize that you had to come dressed up, so I just
pulled stuff out of my cupboard,” Ellen von Unwerth said. Olivier Theyskens wore a mask made from the invitation to the party, with holes poked out for eyes and
nose. “I just did it there, on the side of the street,” Theyskens said. He slapped it onto a pair of eyeglasses.
Marc Jacobs already had the glittering horns he wore on his head. “Stephen Jones did them for me for a spring collection a few years ago,” Jacobs told VF Daily.
Lady Gaga Fame is billed as the first-ever black eau de parfum; it turns clear once it becomes airborne. What does Jacobs make of that? Turning to watch Gaga’s
sleeping-and-being-touched performance for a moment, he turned back to us and said, “Well, you wouldn’t expect her to do something that’s been done before,
really, would you?”
No, indeed, we would not. And, it turned out, that was only phase one of the performance piece.
After Gaga “woke,” she primped in front of a mirror, brushed her hair, touched up her makeup. David Bowie’s “Fame” came on the sound system. She sprayed the
perfume onto her neck. At one point, she crouched for awhile—it was hard to tell exactly what she was doing, but the general consensus was that she peed into a
champagne bucket—and an assistant helped her to dress.
Sitting on the floor of the perfume-bottle space, she and Steven Klein kissed and smoked on an electronic cigarette. She swigged from a bottle of Patrón and changed
into a corset, her bare ass visible to all, projected on the giant screen above the Guggenheim lobby.
Someone started shaving over the recently shaved portion of the back of Gaga’s head, and then he repeatedly dabbed it with paper, eventually revealing a design—an
angel. For the next hour and a quarter, we watched Lady Gaga get a new tattoo on the back of her head.
What would she do next? The answer came at 11 PM, as Guggenheim staffers circulated among partygoers, politely asking them to leave, as the museum was now closed.