She was wearing a black, plastic dominatrix suit, sporting a vaguely ancient Egyptian piece of headgear and singing about being in love with Judas.

Apparently this is a popular song, popular enough that when I Googled “Judas” the first four hits are links to the lyrics and various videos for the song—the fifth is the Wikipedia entry for Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve.

I’ll spare you the lyrics, as they are not richly literary, but suffice it to say that she, or should I say the “persona” singing the song, is in love with Judas and wants to seduce him, even though she knows that he’s a good for nothing liar: “Jesus is my virtue / And Judas is the demon I cling to…I am beyond repentance / fame hooker, prostitute wench, vomits her mind / But in the cultural sense I just speak in the future tense . . .”

This is the sort of lyric that her fans (and some cultural commentators, such as the writers and fans of on-line journal Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writing and Art About Lady Gaga) say sets her apart from the bubble gum pop stars.

They claim that Gaga’s act is performance art of the highest and most subversive order, and they write, in some cases, very astutely observed essays pointing out visual rhymes between stills from Gaga videos and performances and religious-themed art, like a portrait of Mary Magdalene by Titian.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the spectacle and theatre of popular music; in fact, I’m fascinated by the number of personages that make up her persona. She’s a mix of Courtney Love, Madonna, Yoko Ono, Maria Abramovic, and Cindy Sherman.

She’s doing it all: critiquing traditional gender roles, challenging Christian mores and aesthetics, and championing the cause of violence against GLBTQ persons, all while giving the middle finger to the very cult of celebrity that has made her really, super rich.

Gaga, born Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, who attended Convent of the Sacred Heart all-girls Catholic School in Manhattan, and later NYU’s Tisch School, clearly picked up enough Catholicism and enough art history and theory before leaving the Church and college (she dropped out), respectively, to fuel her art, which, as “Judas” and many of her other songs and accompanying videos show, wrings all of the grotesqueness and cheap, kicky kink out of scripture and Christian iconography in order to produce an act that is entertaining to the PoMo “Post-Christian” sensibility.

Mounting a critique of Lady Gaga’s image, behavior, personal beliefs, effect on the youth of today, or what it “says about our culture” that she is, now that Michael Jackson is dead, the biggest pop star on the planet, is beside the point. I don’t mean that it’s like shooting fish in a barrel; it’s more that criticism and opprobrium are exactly what Gaga, like many performance artists are fishing for.

I don’t have a problem with artists angling for shock, but Gaga fancies herself a bit of a prophet, too, as the lyrics to Judas proclaim: “in the cultural sense I just speak in the future tense.”

I hope she doesn’t mean that one man’s sacrilege is another’s enlightened mind—that’s a bit too easy for someone of Gaga’s talent and cleverness—but more that perhaps Gaga is from the future, albeit a not-so-distant one, and she has seen the ruins of culture and has returned to warn us.

Though I don’t think that’s quite it either. All artists are of the future because of their constantly probing vision. Flannery O’Connor said that a writer must be a “realist of distances,” someone who sees near things as though from afar and far things as though near.

This is a less grandiose notion than someone’s genius being able to foil the very laws of time and space, but in some ways it is a radically simple and humble sort of vision: the idea that a person is able to look far ahead into the cultural haze (O’Connor herself comes to mind) in order to help make us pedestrians more sure-footed, or, to have spent so much time gazing at the close-at-hand (a St. Francis, for example, or Dorothy Day) that we begin to see, paradoxically, that the workaday is connected to a place “in the distance.”

O’Connor’s vision was, to some degree, formed by lupus, which caused her great physical and mental pain, and kept her, a writer just reaching the height of her powers, from straying too far from her rural Georgia home until her death at the age of 39.

It’s clear from O’Connor’s fiction and letters that the illness that plagued her was a constant source of inspiration, as her fiction meditates on the physically and mentally tormented.

So, when I heard Lady Gaga had tested positive for the possible development of lupus I couldn’t help but make the leap to thinking about O’Connor whose life was cut short by the same disease at the age of 39.

How might this disease shape Gaga’s vision? I have no clue, and let me say for the record that I hope she is able to live a long, healthy and pain-free life.

In the meantime, though it sounds morose, I will follow Gaga’s career more closely, looking for signs that her vision of the world (and the future) are changing.

Gaga now 25, has at least fourteen years to think upon it.