Louvre opens up for 90-minute tour of museum featuring all paintings from video 'Apes***' by Beyonce and Jay Z
Queen Bey and Jay Z never cease to surprise their fans and keeping dropping surprises, sometimes in the form of an album and sometimes it could be just a tour around the Louvre in Paris. After Beyonce and Jay Z dropped their power-packed video of the track 'Apes**t' from their new album 'Everything is Love' which was released on June 16, the Louvre decided to dedicate a 90-minute guided art tour to visitors. The tour will take the visitors through all the 17 key works that have appeared in the six-minute video, from 'Nike of Samothrace' and the 'Mona Lisa' to the 'Venus de Milo' and 'Portrait of a Negress'.
The video has been viewed over 56 million times on YouTube alone. It is almost like a celebration of black empowerment in an institution which has always excluded everything "un-white" from its history of civilization. The 'Portrait of Negress' was painted in 1800, almost six years after France abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies, although it was brought back by Napolean only two years later. Probably Beyonce dancing with other black dancers in front of David's 'The Coronation of Napolean I and the Crowning of Empress Josephine' is almost symbolical to the fact that the community who have always been deprived of their own right to freedom is now reclaiming over all that which their so-called masters consider as heritage.
Choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui explained during an interview with Pitchfork, "I think the dancers are just so beautiful, and there’s something very sculptural about them. When they are inside of that space—just right on the stairs or suddenly moving in the group—you have the feeling that they could be those ancient mythological goddesses of the hunt or of wisdom. My projection of that was that they were embodiments of goddesses. Of course, [they’re] contemporary bodies, [they’re] people from here and now. But [the video] speaks to something very ancient and kind of mythological."
Agence France Presse reports that the guide of the tour will be describing every piece of art in detail. The video has been described by Professor James Smalls of the University of Maryland as an "arresting...I would even go so far as to say brilliant." He continues to say, "appropriates, exploits, and reinterprets Western paintings and sculptures as a way to chart and celebrate the Carters' success, and black bodies in an artistic canon inextricably linked to histories of colonialism...The video is an unapologetic visual and sonic manifesto about spaces, power, and control...It is all about bodies — an orchestrated contrast of energetically writhing and animated black physiques set against frozen white forms of the past."
The Louvre has not yet given out any word about how much the couple has spent to shoot inside the museum, however, director Jean-Luc Martinez has decided to make the museum's collection "more readable" for a wider audience. Last year more than two-thirds of its 8.1 million visitors were foreigners, half of whom were under 30. On the other hand, Queen Bey and her husband Jay Z are currently on their OTR II tour, as today they released the CD editions of their album 'Everything is Love'.
