At best, Sasha Velour is a ripoff of Max.

Max: Season Seven

Sasha: Season Nine

At worst, she’s everything that is wrong with the world.

She’s gentrification.

She is the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial of drag.

She is the Mr. Brainwash of drag.

Take her Lady Gaga look.

Sasha’s Gaga look from the first episode of Drag Race season nine

A fundamental feature of Sasha’s art drag is that she can’t let a moment pass without reminding you what she is doing with drag is art.

So when tasked to pick one of Lady Gaga’s looks for a runway look, Sasha did a perfect impersonation of the cover of Art Pop.

If Pop art industrialized the content of fine art by copying the aesthetics of consumer products and pop culture iconography — prefiguring the total absorption of fine art production into market capitalism — Art Pop continues that same mechanism. It’s Lady Gaga’s contribution of herself to the art market.

So, did Sasha pick that look because she’s painfully literal and it had the word Art in the title? Or, perhaps more disappointing — did Sasha pick Art Pop as a sigil of a new kind of drag of her own invention: Pop Art drag? The perfect distillation of her brand, drag that has been filtered of shock, of the weird and the grotesque — drag that is far more palatable and marketable for a Brooklyn art gallery? More palatable and marketable too, for the new “mainstream” audience that VH1 is courting for Rupaul’s Drag Race?

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We can all agree that Sasha is literal. She wears a cage on her head to signify being trapped. She’s holding a copy of a Keith Haring painting to signify — a Keith Haring painting. The second order meaning of this was even MORE literal - Keith Haring is an artist from New York, therefore Sasha Velour is an artist from New York. By way of Illinois, that is.

She’s even literal with her own personality. Sasha’s evidence that she is “smart” — her calling card — is that she knows a smart person’s name. See her bewildering impression of queer theorist Judith Butler, which did nothing to inform the mainstream audience of Butler’s values or philosophy, aside from the fact that there is an obscure person who exists who is named Judith Butler.

By the end of the season, after getting some criticism for being perhaps too literal with her symbology and called out on some of her more derivative moments by the other queens, Sasha has a moment of self-reflection. In the episode Category Is… she says that she’s finally learned she doesn’t have to over-explain her drag, that people might just get it by looking at it.

But in that same episode, in her final drag performance, she raps that she’s a queen with “brains,” that she “innovates,” that she’s a “thinking queen,” and she is “better than art.” Unfortunately, she has wasted the entire performance telling you that she’s smart, innovative and artistic, and in actuality, nothing smart, innovative or artistic happens.

The artistic, innovative, and smart look that Sasha came up with for that performance.

She just can’t stop over explaining. Because while Sasha knows what art is, the viewer of Sasha Velour is not as smart as Sasha Velour. She has made herself an art object for an audience she doesn’t believe knows how to consume her. So she constantly instructs them. All tell no show.

Sasha Velour’s drag is full of these pop art meta-signs, signs that have been expropriated from context and meaning. She is art that calls itself art for being formally artistic or reminiscent of high fashion. But when it comes to content, all that is signified is a lack of content. Aesthetic has been liberated from substance.

Kennedy Davenport explaining an innovative, artistic and completely insane look the right way.

Take her signature pose — this silent impression of a scream — open mouthed with her gloved hand in a claw. She offers us the image of a scream– the selfie scream, the scream that is ready to be infinitely digitally reproduced. A scream without a catalyst or urgency. A scream to show to a child who can’t identify facial expressions under T for Terror in the A B C’s of feeling.

Sasha Velour’s signature is a child-proof scream. She offers us a drag queen who isn’t ever too loud. Or too anything at all. An appropriate scream. A refined scream.

So much of the best drag race moments are those where the performers reconfigure pain into spectacle. Kennedy leaping into a split off the stage in sky high heels. Violet’s terrifying 18-inch waste. Shea hot gluing her face. Alaska screaming, “Drag fucking hurts!” during her All Stars Meltdown. There is so much power in those moments, where the viewer knows pain is present, and impossibly overcome for a performance. Through pain is transformation.

There is no pain in Sasha’s scream.

Now let’s take her baldness — Sasha is a bald queen because her mom had cancer. Drag is a performance, we get it, you’re performing an homage to your mom. Okay.

But Sasha Velour the drag character doesn’t have cancer. Sasha Velour the character is not an intricate performance of illness, that honors the density of the experience of the cancer sufferer. (For that kind of affective, disturbing and beautiful art informed by illness, check out @matieresfecales — the Parisian artist collective.)

Sasha Velour the character is not bald from chemotherapy. Sasha Velour the character is not in pain. She is not readying herself for death. She is not grieving a life cut short. She is not trying desperately to be strong. There is no feeling attached to the baldness. There is no meaning, yet again.

Sasha is just bald.

Stripped of pain. Stripped of affect. Just bald to show that “bald is beautiful,” because, I guess women HAVE TO be beautiful.

Even when facing terminal illness.

Sasha is smart. She knows about queer history. She knows when it’s important and she’ll tell you so. “It is not insignificant that the victims were people of color,” she said of the Orlando shooting — but why Sasha? She doesn’t elaborate. It’s not insignificant. Sasha knows what’s significant, and what isn’t significant. But the significance itself is missing, like the scream, like the pain, like the cancer. If we were smarter we might know what she means by the significance, but Sasha won’t spell it out for us. She’s a signifier, pointing at nothing. She’s just pointing.

Sasha is different.

Sasha is trying to do something different with drag — something “innovative” — something original. “So…we all know that I’m trying to do different things than we’ve seen before. And I think this accomplishes that,” she says about this look in Untucked Episode 8.

“You know what?” Peppermint responds, “It’s also Grace Jones.”

The other queens agree.

“Thank you, this is my only hope in life.” Sasha says with a tight, forced smile.

She’s Grace Jones (but white, but I guess that’s insignificant.)

Sasha is different, she shows you something you’ve never seen before. That is, if you don’t know she’s copying Grace Jones.

In the reunion episode of Season Nine, a conflict arises between the breakout star of the season — Valentina — and Sasha Velour. “You wanted to be on the show because you wanted to be a star,” Sasha accuses Valentina. “I didn’t want to be a star.” Valentina responds. “I wanted to show the star that I am.”

Sasha looks shocked. “Uh..” she stutters awkwardly. Valentina’s comment — obnoxious, arrogant, petulant but completely authentic — leaves Sasha speechless. Valentina has expressed something that Sasha can’t seem to grasp: that drag is an uncovering of self, a way of externalizing the imaginary. Drag is a creation that erupts out of innate talent and intimate self-knowledge.

But not for Sasha. Instead, Sasha has built a studied, intricate construction, pieced together from other people. Beneath the layers of Sasha’s aesthetic is an engine of tireless effort, and a dirty little secret — Illinois.

Sasha Velour is not the living work of art she’d like to be. She’s not “innovative” or “different” — no matter how many times she tells you she is. Sasha’s drag character is actually a quite common type of femme, but not the painfully cool punk chick like Adore. Or the spooky weirdo like Sharon. Or the hooking glamor showgirl like Kennedy.

Sasha is an average, bourgeois white girl.

She’s what white women hate about themselves and each other. Sasha is a girl who devours other people’s creativity and suffering, and spits out some whitewashed, safe, appropriate aesthetic that she slaps her name on and calls art.

Then again, could that be the point? Could it be that Sasha Velour’s true satire, her true humor, is to show us that funhouse mirror liberal-arts-white-girl? To show us the cultured, conscious white girl, who reads the right theory, listens to and watches the right things, has the right sensitivities and uses respectful pronouns, but shamelessly steals the art and pain of the marginalized as her own vacuous, but beautiful kitsch? Lies about being “from New York” because she’s ashamed of being basic or boring?

Does her Drag Character, as the embodiment of appropriated identity and bourgeois narcissism, admonish white girls to face their own shame — to empathize, to listen to the the screams of their mothers, their sisters and those people of color whose lives are “not insignificant?” To support and admire them instead of robbing them blind? Is this what Sasha wants to say with her drag character on some astronomically abstract level?

Stop being nice and beautiful and smart and different, lest you end up empty, like her?

Or is she just bald?