And, as with almost the entire canon of Western art, the assembly on David’s canvas is all white. Of course Napoleon hadn’t imagined anyone dancing into it. The emperor himself said of David’s 20-foot-high, 32-foot-long painting, “What relief, what truthfulness! This is not a painting one walks in this picture.” Throughout the video, the flesh of the performers echoes the realistic figurative representations, whether in paint or stone. Dancers do crunches on a broad staircase, and when they later gyrate in formation in front of Jacques-Louis David’s immense 1807 canvas commemorating the coronation of Napoleon, their abs are as prominent as those on the Greco-Roman statues. The video opens on a young man in dreads, sneakers, and ripped jeans wearing angel wings sirens wail in the distance and bells toll forlornly, an elegiac soundscape in a city that has seen too much terror in recent years.īut the Louvre is one of civilization’s bastions against the world’s latest wave of nihilism, and music’s supreme power couple make the most of it. In their new video, “Apeshit,” Beyoncé and Jay-Z shock in more subtle ways, not least by pulling off the shoot of their dynamic and complex music video at Paris’s Louvre Museum in total secrecy. But when the film’s infamous eye-slashing scene lit up the various arenas on the tour schedule, groans, screams, and knowing cheers from art students in the audience mixed with the pot smoke. Doubtless many were only dimly aware of Salvador Dalí as a comic stereotype of the mad artist, and even fewer knew of Luis Buñuel’s artistic provocations. Thin White Duke fans, eager for the rapturous feedback of the album’s title track to wash over them, were nonplussed when the 1929 black-and-white film Un Chien Andalou began to play. In 1976, five year s before the debut of MTV (and almost seven years before Michael Jackson became the first African American artist featured on the channel), David Bowie turned to a surrealist classic in lieu of a warm-up band for his Station to Station tour. Andy Warhol’s peelable banana cover for the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut disk and his zipper motif for the Rolling Stones’ 1971 Sticky Fingers album both wittily played with the horndog ethos of rock ’n’ roll. Pop music has long cherished collisions with the visual arts. The emperor said, “What relief, what truthfulness! This is not a painting one walks in this picture.” YOUTUBE