The works featured are not only some of the most famous in the museum, but the most important in the art historical canon. This video, however, ups the ante-not only in terms of complexity but also sophistication. In just the last couple of years, Beyoncé worked New York-based artist Awol Erizku for her internet-breaking pregnancy photo shoot, Jay-Z created a performance video, titled “Picasso Baby,” using famous art figures and celebrities at Pace Gallery, and even their 6-year-old daughter made headlines for bidding on a $19,000 Sidney Poitier painting at a Los Angeles benefit. The Carters are no strangers to the art world. Titled “Apes**t,” their latest collaboration features the power couple, along with dancers, using the famous Paris museum as the backdrop and putting their own artistry in juxtaposition with the trove of Western artworks in the collection. (Of course, he regularly describes the African-American amassment of wealth as a political act in itself.) On 2009’s “ Already Home,” he brags, “I’m a work of art, I’m a Warhol already,” and, indeed, Jay-Z has realized Andy Warhol’s vision of the artist-as-corporate-entity more completely than Warhol, with his Factory and roster of superstars, ever did.Leave it to Beyoncé and Jay-Z to take over the Musée du Louvre for their latest music video in a grand fashion. (Kanye West did once link on his blog to a roundup of “promising young black artists.”) For Jay-Z, at least, his interest in the artists he champions seems to have as much if not more to do with their relationship to money as with their relationship to race.
It’s perhaps curious that Jean-Michel Basquiat is the only black art star to really penetrate the hip-hop airspace, at least as explicit references go, even as the field of black art stars has grown more crowded. “Every step you take they remind you, you ghetto,” Jay-Z raps on the “Grammy Family” freestyle. Like Jay-Z, who has toyed in several of his songs with popular conceptions of himself as violent, misogynist, or otherwise brutish, Basquiat also played in his scratchy canvases with the notion of the black “primitive”-a term that came under scrutiny in the ‘80s art world, and which had been applied to Basquiat early on. The pair’s artistic preoccupations overlap, too. With Basquiat’s demise in mind, Jay-Z, the invincible hustler who refuses to lose, grapples with the idea of the self-destructive success story: “Game stays the same, the name changes/ So it’s best for those not to overdose on being famous.” Whereas Hirst’s art mingles wealth and death, Basquiat’s career (which begins at about the same time as hip-hop itself) mingles fame and death. The album received universal acclaim receiving an average score of 85 on Metacritic based on 31 reviews and made multiple year end lists of the years best albums. In this company, Basquiat figures both as a civil rights hero-a type to whom Jay-Z often compares himself-and a cautionary tale. On September 27th 2016, Danny Brown released his fourth studio album featuring guest appearances from Petite Noir, Kendrick Lamar, Earl Sweatshirt, Ab-Soul, Kelela, and B-Real. Jay-Z begins by rapping that he’s “inspired by Basquiat,” and puts the artist-born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican and Haitian parents in 1960, an international star by his early 20s, dead of a drug overdose at 27-in a continuum of fallen icons that includes Malcolm X, Michael Jackson, and Kurt Cobain. An insight into his appreciation comes in one of the best, most dexterous rhymes of his career, a 2006 freestyle over Kanye West’s “Grammy Family” instrumental. Jay-Z seems to feel a kinship of a different sort with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jay-Z, the implication goes, totally knows. We’re left to scratch our heads as to what, for instance, that ram skull is about, or why the woman crouched on that stack of crates is holding martial-arts fighting sticks. The gleaming 2011 Jaguar XJ that appears in several shots isn’t the only thing tantalizingly beyond our grasp-so is the meaning behind most of what we see. Photographed in the sumptuous black and white of a Richard Avedon portrait, these images and others combine to form a seductive, faintly menacing cipher. For starters: No other rap video has featured flaming basketballs, power cords whipping madly beneath fluorescent bulbs, and a fidgety evil clown. The track features guest vocals from producer and. In the lyrics, Jay-Z promises that no matter where you are, he’s one step ahead of you-“on that next shit”-and the video is his attempt to illustrate that boast in unexpected ways. This is the fourth single from American rapper Jay Zs eleventh studio album, The Blueprint 3 in the US only. The video for Jay-Z’s “ On to the Next One,” which he released on New Year’s Eve, is the sort of densely packed curio cabinet that encourages repeat visits.