Time to go to Paris, y’all.
Two weeks and some change has passed since Beyoncé and her husband surprised-dropped their long-rumored collaborative album Everything Is Love, and (I’m calling it right now) one of the greatest music videos of the past decade for the single “APESHIT.”
In the six-minute video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z navigate the Louvre, placing black and brown bodies at the center of Western art tradition. The video was enough to spawn dissertations, and apparently the Louvre agrees. The museum is now offering a 90-minute tour inspired by “APESHIT,” which includes 17 exhibits, ending with Jacques-Louis David pupil Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s 1800 painting, Portrait d’une femme noire (Portrait of a black woman.)
According to the official Louvre site, the tour is only available in French. Better study up! And if you’re still processing the imagery in the video—as I imagine many of us will be for months—I recommend reading Doreen St. Félix’s piece for The New Yorker, where she writes: “Their engagement with the European canon housed in the Louvre, their physical proximity to it, shouldn’t be flattened into a shorthand for transgression. It is not presented that way. They are interested, instead, in playing with tableaux.”
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