![]() ![]() The painter Will Cotton was the artistic director for Katy Perry's California Gurls music video in 2010. Other celebrities, too, have engaged with the art world. And The Carters, like The Mona Lisa, are celebrities with far reaching influence. In both scenes they are compared directly to their painted co-star. The scene is also a reference to their viral photo shoot at the Museum in 2014, in which they also took a photo alongside Da Vinci's most famous painting. ![]() They are presented one-to-one with the best known portrait in Western Art, equaling it in regality. Jay-Z wears a pale teal suit with a gold medallion, Beyoncé is in a pink silk smoking jacket, richly accessorized with diamonds. In the next scene Beyoncé and Jay-Z are pictured dramatically standing alongside La Jaconde, The Mona Lisa. It then transitions inside the museum with lavishly gilt interiors appropriate to a former palace and details of fine European paintings. The video opens with a cinematic shot of a black figure with angel wings standing guard outside the Louvre by night bells chiming in the distance. ![]() It takes part in an ongoing tradition of celebrities engaging with high art, it places the uniquely American art form of rap on the same level with European masterpieces, and it corrects the lack of diversity that is often taken for granted in cultural institutions, not only in the Old World, but in the New as well. The Apeshit video is stunningly styled, choreographed, and filmed. It features Beyoncé and Jay-Z in the empty Louvre Museum perhaps the greatest bastion of so-called "high culture", and also the center of the predominantly white and male tradition of Western Art. The new video, shared with unwitting fans via Instagram on Saturday afternoon, has over seven million views as of this writing (a little more than 24 hours after release). The video was filmed entirely at the Louvre and was directed by Ricky Saiz, who previously collaborated with Beyoncé on the video for her track Yoncé. The first music video for the album accompanies the single Apeshit and was released under the duo's co-moniker The Carters. (A red sash tied around a white swatch of fabric that covers the lower part of her body has also been cut.) The unknown sitter stares out in the video, taking up the full screen, her hair wrapped in a turban, her eyes angled slightly to her right as she shows one golden hoop earring (a pose that brings to mind Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Painter), 2009).On Saturday, Beyoncé and Jay-Z released a surprise new album, Everything is Love, on Tidal the streaming service they co-own. The video crops Benoist’s portrait so that the servant’s exposed breast is no longer visible. Kadish, a scholar on French slavery, has written that, while some have read the woman in Benoist’s painting as an allegory for the republic (she is surrounded by the tricolor) or noted her resolute gaze, the art historian Griselda Pollock has compared the image to that of a scene in a slave auction, and the art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has written that its offensive title, which dehumanizes the sitter, “exercises a form of mastery or subordination: the sitter is robbed, like a slave, of her person’s property.” Possibly showing a servant brought to France from the Antilles by Benoist’s brother-in-law, it was painted in 1800, after the abolition of slavery by France but just as Napoleon was working to reinstate it in the nation’s colonies.ĭoris Y. Perhaps the most intriguing inclusion is a close-up shot of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress (1800) near the end of the video. Occasionally the lyrics and paintings cleverly sync up, too, as when Beyoncé sings, “Sippin’ my favorite alcohol/Got me so lit I need Tylenol” while details of wine being generously poured in Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana (1563) flash on screen. 2600 B.C.), the Venus de Milo (101 B.C.), The Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 B.C.), and David’s Coronation of Napoleon (1805–07), their movements and poses sometimes loosely mirroring those of figures in the artworks. The leading couple and their accompanying dancers also spend time with iconic works like the Great Sphinx of Tanis (ca. Jacques-Louis David’s Coronation of Napoleon (1805–07). ![]()
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