Another month, another V Magazine memo from Lady Gaga. And, while her past missives for the magazine have been disappointingly safe, the September 2011 dispatch is a talker. In this edition, Gaga takes on critics, proposing that today’s journalists are engaging in “Extreme Critical Fundamentalism” by “instilling fear in the hopes and dreams of young inventors in order to establish an echelon of tastemakers.” She wonders: “Does every critic have the soul to really receive a work in the transcendental sense?”
Although she seems to feel that these concerns apply to all sorts of cultural critics, the only one she mentions is The New York Times‘ famously prickly Cathy Horyn, who Gaga feels needs to “employ a more modern and forward approach to criticism, one that separates [her] from the average individual at home on their laptop.” In fact, she far prefers 15-year-old Tavi Gevinson, whose “prodigious and well-written blog is the future of journalism.” Not that we aren’t charmed by Tavi — whose endlessly hyped teen-girl style site debuts Monday — but we’re not quite ready to surrender to our high-school overlords yet. Moreover, a celebrity who has spent her career mining the past of pop music (and pop art) doesn’t seem terribly qualified to lecture us about the future of journalism. [via Observer ]