Beyoncé and Jay Z broke the internet with the release of their video for their new song “Apeshit” off of their collaboration album Everything Is Love. The setting of the entire video was the Louvre, the largest art museum in the world located in Paris.
Throughout the video Beyoncé and her dancers are swaying and strutting around the museum, upstaging a lot of the artworks behind them. “I was thinking a lot about how people – especially white people, European and American people – go to really romanticize empire, to think about genealogies of white male artists, and then we have Beyoncé, a black woman, and her husband, dancing around in the Louvre,”art historian Alexandra Thomas told TIME Magazine. She went on to call this juxtaposition “an embodied intervention of Western art.”
There’s also some representation of black art in the video. Their commentary on black wealth resonates in the Louvre’s Egyptian galleries, where Beyoncé raps in front of the Great Sphinx of Tanis. At the end of the video shows the two in front of the Mona Lisa, with Beyoncé conveying a similar facial expression to the famous artwork.
Personally, I love the Louvre and I can stare hours at the Mona Lisa….some call it small but I think it is an amazing masterpiece from DaVinci. I go and visit her every time I visit Paris.