beyonce jay z apeshit video cinemtographer

They are playing on a recent trend by several contemporary black artists, such as the African-American portrait painter, Kehinde Wiley, to strategically mine aspects of European art and art history as a means to harness a bold and confident insertion and assertion of a black presence, insistence on global recognition, and commercial gain. They are not the first, however, to draw from Western art and art history or to use recognizable art locations to make a statement about access and power. Courtesy: the artistsīy packaging and selling their version of blackness, black bodies, and black culture, the Carters have asserted their right (and, by extension, the right of all black people) to do so while at the same time exploiting to their advantage the very culture that has, for so long, excluded people like them. Perhaps most important and timely is that ‘Apeshit’ is a video that begs contemplation in the context of recent incidents (the case in April of two black men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks for ‘trespassing’ while waiting for a business meeting comes to mind) in which the presence of black bodies in public spaces has raised paranoid fears among some white people about dark bodies and their claim to those spaces.īeyoncé and Jay-Z, ‘Apeshit’, 2018, film still. It’s about arrival and survival through declaration of one’s hard-earned position in society. It is about establishing a new order in which black bodies seize and command cultural and physical spaces from which they have traditionally been excluded and are typically marginalized. To be sure, ‘Apeshit’ is all about bodies – an orchestrated contrast of energetically writhing and animated black physiques set against frozen white forms of the past. The video is an unapologetic visual and sonic manifesto about spaces, power, and control. ‘Apeshit’ is an arresting, and I would even go so far as to say brilliant video for what it does and does not do for what it reveals and conceals for the ways in which it meaningfully appropriates, exploits, and reinterprets Western paintings and sculptures as a way to chart and celebrate the Carters’s public and commercial success, and black bodies in an artistic canon inextricably linked to histories of colonialism. The video begins with fragments and close-ups of European paintings from the Louvre, a hallowed cultural space where masterpieces of European culture and civilization are housed, where imperial and colonial might through conquest and acquisition are put on grand display. For Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z, the measured exploitation of these things through high art and popular culture is best witnessed in ‘Apeshit,’ a track and accompanying 6-minute video from their first joint album called Everything is Love.

The Louvre just announced a “JAY-Z and Beyoncé at the Louvre” tour, which visits all the art in their music video.Spanning the terrain from high art to popular culture and everything in-between, the complexity of race, gender, and culture continues to dog us.

But now, fans of the Carters and everyday aesthetes need not wonder. The whole six-minute video is a visual, and historical, whirlwind of different artistic movements- Romantic! Hellenistic! Renaissance! While some works are easily identifiable, others are only seen in quick flashes or extreme close ups, leaving viewers curious as to what exactly they just saw. And what better way to claim their status within the hierarchy of the arts than to stand amongst Western fine art's greatest hits when delivering their own greatest hit? As Beyoncé and Jay-Z weave through the building, they are calling attention to the stark lack of colored people depicted throughout the museum's masterworks. Carter, statuesque in front of the Mona Lisa, rapping in front of Winged Victory of Samothrace, drifting through arched halls “first as spectators and then as works of art themselves.” And while there is much to admire about the video (the Carter's ineffable cool, the cinematic cinematography, of course, the song itself), perhaps most poignant is the symbolism. When Beyoncé and Jay-Z dropped their music video for “Apeshit,” shot on location at the Louvre Museum, the world went, well. Beyoncé and Jay-Z in front of the Great Sphinx of Tanis.

Beyonce jay z apeshit video cinemtographer