Engaging with the space of the museum as though the clip were a virtual tour and speaking differently to different audiences, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, as I will call the collective of creative, sometimes anonymous artists responsible for the music video, act as the curators of a new museum experience, inviting their audience to linger in close proximity to art that may be, or appear as, new. As it leads past the museum’s iconic masterpieces, splicing extreme close-ups of paintings, panning shots highlighting the place’s grandeur, and tracking shots zooming in on the artists with scenes of dancing and displays of wealth typical of hip-hop culture (e.g., a Lamborghini and expensive designer clothes and jewelry), the video invites reflection on what it means to be inside the Louvre and to view the works again, or for the first time. From there, we move to the Daru staircase, atop of which Beyoncé and Jay-Z stand in front of the winged Nike of Samothrace, and later see Jay-Z rapping in front of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, while Beyoncé and her dancers perform in front of Jacques-Louis David’s Coronation of Joséphine. The camera then shifts to the museum’s interior and shows Eugène Delacroix’s ceiling painting, Apollo Vanquishing the Python, followed by flashes of Andrea Solario’s Madonna with the Green Cushion and Paolo Veronese’s Jupiter Punishing the Vices, before zooming in on the Carters standing in front of the Mona Lisa in the Salle des États. “APESHIT” opens with a night shot of a crouching, winged man outside the Louvre. Directed by Ricky Saiz, who works as a designer for the streetwear brand Supreme, the six-minute clip shows “Queen Bey” and her husband take possession of the former royal palace, like the “music royalty” they are, and sing about having made it-financially but also by being inside this bastion of white cultural power: “I can’t believe we made it / This is what we’re thankful for.” Following its release, the music video quickly spread through social media, inevitably amassing a wealth of commentaries and exegeses in the process. It was subsequently released on Beyoncé’s official YouTube channel and made available through Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming service. ![]() The music video, which would be nominated Best Music Video at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards in February 2019 and win Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards, among other accolades, was first shown at the end of their second On the Run II Tour show at London Stadium on June 16, 2018, where it was followed by the announcement that a new album was out. In June 2018 Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z (together known as the musical duo the Carters) released their video clip “APESHIT” to announce and promote their new album, Everything Is Love. Exploring the ways in which the politics of proximity, contiguity, and access in “APESHIT” interface with those of representation to challenge the white colonialist narrative of the museum, this article seeks to understand how dancing affects the social space of the museum and what kind of knowledge dancing at the museum produces. For this, I focus on the music video “APESHIT” (2018) and bring rhetorical theory in dialogue with recent theory on proximity, to build on Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of the contact zone as a social space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” Filmed at the Musée du Louvre and released to promote the new album of R&B singer Beyoncé and her husband, rapper Jay-Z, the music video produces the art museum as a contact zone by bringing black dancers and singers into its space and staging relations between the performers and some of its iconic pieces. ![]() In this article, the rhetorical figure of parataxis will be developed as a concept to inquire into what happens when performers dance at the museum, and how such dancing can be an agent of social change. The curatorial turn, with its shift of attention from the individual (autonomous) artwork toward the exhibition and the role of the curator in its creation, has brought about a renewed focus on the museum as a political space a space for experimentation and for transformation, for knowledge creation, and for social regeneration.
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