France has been stunned after discovering that music’s most famous couple managed to shoot a video for their latest album in the world’s most famous museum in total secret in Paris.
Beyonce and Jay-Z are the world’s music power couple, with the pop diva alone selling around 120 million albums and her hip-hop husband now worth $810 million (£610m), according to Forbes.
The Louvre museum in Paris, meanwhile, received 8.1 million visitors last year, making it the world’s most frequented as tourists from around the globe flock to see iconic works from the Mona Lisa to Jacques Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon.
Beyonce and Jay-Z took fans and the world by surprise on Saturday by announcing the release of their joint new album, Everything is Love, from the stage in London as they kicked off a global tour. Available only on Jay-Z’s newly-created Tidal streaming service, the album swiftly racked up ten million sales.
Telegraph
Among the tracks, the second, called Apeshit, and which the French translated as “excitation sauvage”, comes with an elaborately choreographed video shot in total discretion in the galleries and the exterior plaza of the Musée du Louvre.
The six-minute clip starts with the Carters, as they are also known, standing in front of the Mona Lisa – Jay-Z in a light green double-breasted suit, Beyonce in a lavender pantsuit. A troupe of scantily clad dancers is then seen swaying sensually in front of The Coronation of Napoleon.
It quickly becomes apparent that the two most prominent African Americans in pop culture are also making a deliberate statement on the marginalisation of black figures in predominantly white Western art.
Close-ups single out black figures in Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, as well as Géricaults The Raft of the Medusa and Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress painted between French revolutionaries’ abolition of slavery in 1794 and Napoleon’s restoration of it in 1802.
Telegraph
The clip features scenes of a woman combing a man’s hair with an afro pick in front of the Mona Lisa, while Beyoncé sings “can’t believe we made it”, serenely seated in a long cream dress before the Winged Victory.
As critic Jason Farago put it: “As so often, the couple here present themselves as both outsiders in an elite institution and as heirs to it; as people excluded from its narratives but now possessors of it by virtue of their talent, their taste and, well, their money.”
“It’s a political clip,” Gert Van Overloop, manager of the video’s choreographer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. “All the dancers are black, most of the Louvre works are seen through this prism. It’s not a clip against, in the sense of revenge, but a clip to affirm the equality between Afro-American culture and more generally black, with white culture.”
Most French critics were wowed. “Breathtaking,” wrote Le Parisien, the capital’s daily, even if it questioned whether the video verged on “megalomania”. “Grandiose,” wrote conservative Le Figaro. "Totally sublime," said Europe 1 radio. Libération suggested the pair had even outdone in hutspah other famous pop couples John Lennon and Yoko Ono or June Carter and Johnny Cash.
Telegraph
Quizzed on its decision to hire out the museum for the clip, Louvre management said the singers were real art fans. “Beyonce and Jay-Z have visited the Louvre four times in the past ten years. During their last visit in May, they raised this idea of a shoot," it wrote. "The timing was tight, but the project quickly won us over, because the synopsis showed a real attachment to the museum and its works, which made a mark on them."
Even the normally stuffy La Tribune de L’Art saw nothing wrong with the Carters taking over the Louvre, as long, it said, as the museum wasn’t specifically shut for the occasion or the works “placed under threat” – neither the case.
Telegraph
The art blog pointed out that the Louvre has long been open to music and film shoots, such as the Da Vinci Code, Wonder Woman, and even The Smurfs 2. Rates are relatively low, with the top fee only €15,000 (£13,150) for a full day’s shoot in the galleries.
“The only disconcerting thing here is the hopelessness of the music and the vulgarity of the singers,” it wrote.
Far more “shameful”, it argued, was the Louvre’s sale of “mugs and Mona Lisa Rubik’s cubes” in close proximity to the world’s greatest masterpieces.
Click Here: cheap sydney roosters jersey