As Danielle Dash wrote in the Independent, the “Apes**t” video is about “welcoming black people into the Louvre and telling them they are valuable… more valuable than Mona Lisa, in fact.” That’s a pretty cool way for the Carters to use their unprecedented visibility.Ĭover image for the Carters’s Everything Is Love.īut let me suggest two other ideas about how they are putting art to work here. Probably the greatest moments in the video are the line of men taking a knee, à la Colin Kaepernick, and the image of the woman lovingly styling a man’s hair with an afro pick in front of the Mona Lisa (the single’s cover).

The message is the same, the art-history equivalent of the song’s lyrics about being too good for the Grammies or the Super Bowl-“you need me, I don’t need you.” Translated: We own this shit. On the “Picasso Baby” track from the 2013 album Magna Carta Holy Grail ( cover art: Battista di Domenico Lorenzi’s Alpheus and Arethusa, from the Met), Jay-Z rapped the line, addressed to his daughter Blue Ivy, “Yellow Basquiat in my kitchen corner / Go ‘head, lean on that shit Blue, you own it.” In “Apes**t ,” the Carters turn the chamber in front of the Great Sphinx of Tanis into a nightclub, while a line of dancers shimmies dangerously close to David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. (The Louvre says Beyoncé and Jay-Z have visited the museum together four times, pitching the concept for the shoot when they swung by just last month.)Īwol Erizku, Beyoncé and Jay Z in front of the Mona Lisa. Here, in the video, they are fiercely and effortlessly aristocratic in their powdered pink and green suits.

If you want to “read” the symbolism of art in it, as many have, what do you get?Ĭompare “Apes**t”’s shot of the Mona Lisa to the couple’s 2014 vacation pic in front of the Mona Lisa. There, they look like tourists, strikingly ordinary for all their natural charisma. It starts and ends with the Mona Lisa, with stop-offs at the Nike of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo, the Oath of the Horatii, the Wedding at Cana, the Raft of the Medusa, and more masterpieces besides in between. The world is going apeshit over “ Apes**t.” Unleashed on Saturday to go with the first track from Everything Is Love, the new joint effort from Jay-Z and Beyoncé (aka the Carters), the characteristically regal music video for the song uses the Musée du Louvre in Paris as backdrop.

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