I'm the new Jean Michel, surrounded by Warhols." A new Gilded Age "Jeff Koons balloons, I just wanna blow up. "Marble floors, gold ceiling, oh what a feeling," he rapped. Jay-Z fed off all this with his 2013 performance, Picasso, Baby, filmed in a New York gallery in front of a crowd of artists, celebrities and dealers. (Without precedents like these, it is hard to imagine the Kardashians.) You have to have swagger, too, to sell celebrity portraits made with silk-screens to an entire class of the rich and famous, as Warhol did. You have to have chutzpah, let's face it, to sell air, as Yves Klein famously did or cans of human waste, as did Piero Manzoni. It has a special place in contemporary art, where it has decades of pedigree and a strange habit of prescience. In art, swagger isn't a quality you find only in the Louvre. (Just ask the other leaders at the recent G-7 summit.) But that same capacity is also what terrifies the world. I don't need them."Īmerica's capacity to define its own reality is admired all over the world, especially by the oppressed, who want – and need – a new reality, and the energy it takes to assert it. "I said no to the Super Bowl," Jay-Z raps. The video is swagger, from start to finish. Beyonce gyrates, Jay-Z gesticulates, and the two strike poses, advertising their iconic marriage, restored to good health (phew!) in front of some of the Louvre's most famous works: the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus di Milo, Theodore Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, Louis David's Coronation of Napoleon, Paolo Veronese's Wedding at Cana. And it stays that way, more or less, for the rest of the clip. Because right here and right now, they are the focus. The Carters decline to look because they can. Given how hard it can be for the rest of us to get anywhere near the Mona Lisa without having to jostle through dense crowds with camera phones, not bothering to face the painting is a statement in itself.īeyonce and Jay-Z's new video was shot in the Louvre. The gallery (which was once, of course, a royal palace) is otherwise empty. Behind them, out of focus, is the Mona Lisa. And then, out of nowhere, comes a moment of pure swagger.īeyonce and Jay-Z, sumptuously dressed, stare out diffidently, like a royal couple posing for a baroque marriage portrait. Filmed in the Louvre, Apeshit begins with close-ups of various old master paintings. The latest video by the Carters, aka Beyonce and Jay-Z, is a treat.
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