I can’t put into words how much shock and joy that brought me. For the first time in its history, it was owned by Black people. Beyoncé and Jay Z were not simply spectators at the Louvre, they owned the whole damn place. At its heart, the APESHIT music video embodies a big fear of right-wing western imperialists – that people of colour should have the ability to see themselves in a white cultural space. The APESHIT video was a tangible image of what I pictured the future of Classics to be: people of colour engaging with a past that was forcefully taken from them, living and breathing in western institutional spaces with a sense of agency, beyond the superficial act of seeing and scrubbing clean the whitewashed objects of eras past. Eventually I realised that my emotional attachment to the video was so strong because this was my dream as a classicist. I re-watched it at least 3 more times to soak it all in, what ‘it’ was I didn’t know.

I have written this piece from the perspective of a non-Black person of colour, who has experienced racism while working in museums where I position the music video and the Carters’ careers alongside other elements from Black cultural history, I have provided reference to analysis by Black critics and scholars who have made such comparisons previously.Īfter I watched the video for the first time my mind was left racing.

This blog post is split into two sections: the first identifies my own proximity to the music video and highlights the institutional racism museum workers of colour must face every day, and the second discusses the music video itself and the symbolism attached to it. And while I’m hardly the first person of colour who recognised this music video as a moment that redefined – and reasserted – non-White identity in the playgrounds of white cultural identity, for me, a Brown person who studies Art History and Classics – two elite, majority-white academic disciplines – the image and the accompanying music video it came from were a middle finger to the institutional racism plaguing these fields and showed me why I belong here and the communities we share within them. The image sparked hundreds of conversations about the significance of two Black people sharing a tender and everyday moment in one of the most instantly recognisable public spaces in the world. We see two of Beyoncé’s backup dancers: Jasmine Harper is picking the hair of Nicholas ‘Slick’ Stewart in front of the Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The Carters released their album, EVERYTHING IS LOVE, the cover of which was taken from the music video for APESHIT – already a sign that the single would come to represent something bigger than itself.

Jay z beyonce met museum music video