BEYONCE JAY Z LOUVRE MUSIC VIDEO HOW TO
BEYONCE JAY Z LOUVRE MUSIC VIDEO FULL

What happens when the visual pushes back against our stories? Images want things from audiences, and they can take them, aggressively and very often without consent. What he means here is that we need to not get so hung up on the thing, the art, or the image that we miss the bigger questions and problems, and thus the bigger story. Mirzoe, for example, suggests that in order to define “visual culture” we need to heed the questions more than the objects. This more optimistic and open version of visual culture has been articulated before. Yet what if this vexing “problem” of too much visual culture is not a problem at all? What if too many images and too many people talking about the visual are the heroic outcome, and not the declension, of the story? We are repeatedly told that we live in the age of the visual, that we are overwhelmed with images and choices of images almost weekly there are reports about how the visual and screens are shifting our cognitive abilities and destroying our perception and concentration. “Visual intelligence” is becoming its own self-help category, one that offers nothing short of “changing your life” and “art as therapy.” Even if you don’t “know” who Beyoncé and Jay-Z are and why they are in the Louvre, we can start thinking about visual culture by asking why those particular images were made in a particular way.Īdditionally, there is great anxiety in this particular historical moment about the changing conditions of visual culture: what it is, who controls it, how it is used to control us, who gets to study it, who makes money off it, what its boundaries are.

BEYONCE JAY Z LOUVRE MUSIC VIDEO HOW TO

There is a whole genre of books that aims to teach audiences how to see: more creatively, more actively, with better perception. Visual culture seems implicated in this fear of not getting it, not seeing what you are supposed to, not being included: visual culture as #fomo. Is there something I’m supposed to see here?” In the classroom, the most frequent phrase I hear, uttered in total frustration and despondency, is, “I just don’t get it. Thus, while there has been an enormous expansion of the field of visual culture, “knowing” is still the field’s great anxiety. While you might have understood the moment Beyoncé and Jay-Z stand with the Mona Lisa between them as cool, if you did not realize they were really filming in the Louvre and the picture between was the real Mona Lisa, much of the impact of the visual was lost.

BEYONCE JAY Z LOUVRE MUSIC VIDEO FULL

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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