SOMEWHERE IN CALIFORNIA, on a lounge chair next to a swimming pool, two men are fighting. One’s black, the other’s white, and both are drunk. Watching them wrestling from the lawn of a McMansion are a dozen other dudes, 16 lesbians, and a diminutive Vietnamese-American woman with pneumatic breasts, 6 billion MySpace friends and an MTV reality series called “A Shot at Love.” Her name is Tila Tequila, and she is America’s most important living performance artist.

On the surface, “A Shot at Love” appears to be like any other reality dating series. Tila, a newly out bisexual, puts her potential paramours through numerous trials—guys have to strut in high heels, girls have to complete 20 push-ups—while sitting on a tennis ref’s chair, dressed in a pair of black handkerchiefs that resemble a swimsuit.

The dudes are ripped but dense—one’s a Rhode Island pizza boy, another’s a hayseed from West Virginia. The girls mostly bitch about the guys and wear bikinis. And as they all vie for Tila’s affections, they begin to clash. Asses are ogled, then slapped; entire sexes are derided; and Lala, a pink-haired black girl with a measure of self-respect who calls Tila “hella-cool,” finally storms out, prompting this exchange.

Tila: “I was really down with you.”

Lala: “I was really down with you too.”

What’s odd here is that Tila—the nubile sexpot who once warned via song that if you toyed with her emotions, she would “fucking kill you”—is cast more often than not in the role of peacemaker. It is she who negotiates with warring parties, who soothes anger, brokers truces and, in a move I believe she borrowed from Madeleine Albright, makes out at random with hotheads on both sides of the conflict. She may once have been “the crazy bitch who’s calling you names,” but on MTV she’s the sanest slut in the playground.

Of course, the trials of the diplomat do wear on our heroine. “I’m not all about fighting,” she tells Lala. “I mean, that really shook me up. That shit is overwhelming for me.” Later, almost in tears, she is comforted by Rebecca. Whenever she gets a chance, she confides that “This is my journey, this is my experience—I gotta figure it out.”

And we might believe her—except that she delivers her hokey lines in an affect so flat she can’t possibly be honest. The words float out of her mouth so fluidly, so free of regional accent or twang or depth or flavor, that they simply highlight the show’s stunning superficiality.

But this—this is Tila’s great performance, an indictment of the culture that has produced so many shows of such mind-numbing shallowness. Like a graduate thesis, “A Shot at Love” plays on the vast gap between signifier and signified, homing in on the way we accept certain words, images and concepts and react to them with our own equally simplistic arsenal.

Take Tila’s initial admission: “I am a bisexual.” In this milieu, this MTV planet of girls who’ve gone wild, of Real World makeout sessions, of sexuality so ubiquitous it has no meaning, does her statement have any import whatsoever? Do we expect that this 26-year-old opportunist non pareil is looking to settle down? And if not, what difference does it make if her quest—her journey to find herself—is successful or not, if she chooses a male or a female?

What’s important, however, is not what Tila says but how her immediate audience of hardbodies reacts. For them, it’s a shock, a proclamation to be dealt with on both moral and personal levels. Some guys groan, some guys leer, some women shake their heads in confusion—as if her words had any other function but to provoke. This is how Tila, in a high-minded critique, plays up our culture’s instinctual addiction to the superficial, and suddenly the blandness of her subsequent lines becomes obvious: How else can you deal with people who refuse to see beyond the words but to offer them nothing but the words themselves, sans intonation, inflection or gesture?

This is hardly Tila’s first foray into Baudrillard territory. In an essay last spring, I argued that, as she crossed over from MySpace stardom to pop stardom, she deliberately chose a persona—psycho-bitch girlfriend—that would clash as loudly as possible with any identity we, her audience, could have imagined for her back when she was solely digital.

Now, however, she’s putting that artist-audience dynamic on display for MTV, showing how even an image drained of color, an identity stripped down to words as bare as her barely sheathed breasts, can still provoke violent, overheated reactions from a cross-section of American men and lesbians. Image, for her, is a Geiger counter, a way of gauging the radioactivity of American culture, which slowly decays and transforms itself over time. Does she like men or women, is she a Brando or a robot, is she a slut or a genius? She is, it seems, our Schrodinger’s pussycat—how we see her depends on whether we dare open her box.

“A Shot at Love” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on MTV.

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