Louvre art museum officials were so blown away by Beyoncé, and Jay-Z’s “Apeshit” video for the couple’s joint album “Everything Is Love” that they’ve launched a special tour of the masterpieces that feature in the film.
The atmospheric six-minute video “Apeshit” includes scenes from the museum and 17 paintings and sculptures, from the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” to Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and Marie Benoist’s “Portrait of a Negress.” The video is a meld of pop and classic, the deeply personal (“I can’t believe we made it,” Beyoncé sings) with the sweeping scale of Western art, African beauty and the plight of slaves.
The museum’s self-guided 90-minute audio tour (“Jay-Z et Beyonce au Louvre”)
is currently only available in French, but other languages will be available soon. The guide explains the artworks in the video, but doesn’t delve into the meaning of the art in the context of “Apeshit.”
Professor James Smalls of the University of Maryland has called the video “an orchestrated contrast of energetically writhing and animated black physiques set against frozen white forms of the past.“
The Louvre is no doubt hoping to capitalize on the 60 million hits “Apeshit” has garnered for the Carters on YouTube since its release last month. The museum already has another music-inspired tour based on will.i.am’s hit “Smile Mona Lisa.”
The Louvre’s director Jean-Luc Martinez has said that he wants to make the museum’s collection more accessible to international visitors. Last year, more than two-thirds of the Louvre’s 8.1 million visitors were from other nations, and half of them were under the age of 30, according to Agence France Presse.
Check out what Huffpost had to say about the video below:
