What Millie Brown Had for Dinner

Lady Gaga has officially done something I didn’t think was still possible: she surprised me. At a show in Texas, she invited artist Millie Brown onstage—who’d spent the pre-show loading up on meat and sausages like a competitive eater preparing for a gallery opening—and let her vomit directly onto her face while continuing to perform. Mid-song. The band kept playing.

Millie Brown, for context, makes this her practice. She ingests colored liquids and purges them onto canvas, which she calls vomit painting. Here it was onto a human face, live, in front of thousands of people, which is either a significant escalation or just the logical endpoint of the concept. I genuinely can’t decide which.

There’s something weirdly admirable about it—not the act itself necessarily, but the commitment. Gaga had spent years stacking outrages, and most of them stopped registering somewhere around 2011. The meat dress became a museum piece. The egg pod became a meme. This one registered, maybe because it involved another person’s actual stomach contents transferred directly to her face while a song played. The physiology cuts through the spectacle in a way that latex and prosthetics don’t.

I’ve been to worse shows. Done more compromising things on worse evenings for a fraction of the cultural credit. But I wasn’t wearing it as a statement.