![]() ![]() ![]() Visual culture only has its full meaning if the context is clear, if the symbols reach the viewer. If the viewer did not know the Louvre, what it looks like, what art is housed there, and perhaps even more importantly what art is not housed there, the video lost much of its radical power and racial rescripting. If you didn’t know the space already or weren’t looking very hard, you could miss that the video was filmed at the Louvre, one of the most famous and arguably most important museums in the world. It was a fairly typical music video, featuring the artists’ undeniable style and gravitas, amazing clothes, and incredible dancers in an opulent setting. Yet, at the same moment, there were likely a very large group of viewers who did not understand what the fuss was about. And every art history/visual culture major in the world finally felt some justification in their educational choices. Reading lists, art history lessons, and crowdsourced syllabi proliferated. While it is now cliché to say that a meme, image, or film “broke the internet,” for a large population of people the internet was not just broken but quaking when Beyoncé and Jay-Z dropped the video for their 2018 single “Apeshit.”ĭepicting the celebrity power couple engaging the Western art canon and its many exclusions in the Louvre in Paris, the video went viral instantly and just as quickly generated dozens of think-pieces about art, race, power, and the ability to manipulate and even reinscribe museum spaces in the spirit of movements such as #blacklivesmatter and #decolonizethismuseum. ![]()
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