Louvre sets up Beyonce, Jay-Z art tour

Show on slavery prompts artist to quit Montreal fest

PARIS, July 4, (AFP): The Louvre has dedicated a new art tour to Beyonce and Jay-Z after pop’s biggest power couple shot the video for their latest hit in the Paris museum.

The R’n’B stars’ hit song “Ape…” — which used some of the museum’s greatest masterpieces as backdrops — has been viewed 56 million times on YouTube alone since it was released a fortnight ago.

Now the Louvre, which already has a tour based on the US rapper will.i.am’s hit “Smile Mona Lisa”, has created another based on the Carters’ night in the museum.

It follows the video through 17 paintings and sculptures which feature in the six-minute clip, going from the monumental white Greek marble “Nike of Samothrace” to Marie Benoist’s “Portrait of a Negress”.

The choice of works which they used or posed in front of has been taken as a celebration of black bodies and empowerment in an institution which was built on the spoils of conquest and imperialism.

“Portrait of a Negress” was painted in 1800, six years after revolutionary France had abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies only for Napoleon to reinstate it two years later.

But perhaps the most striking image is of Beyonce at the centre of a line of black dancers in front of David’s “The Coronation of Napoleon I and the Crowning of the Empress Josephine” singing, “I can’t believe we made it.”

The song is part of their surprise joint album, “Everything is Love” — their first — which they released under their real family name, The Carters.

It is a celebration of African-American identity and their marriage, whose problems and Jay-Z’s infidelity Beyonce detailed in her 2016 album “Lemonade”.

The guide describes in detail each artwork in the video but stops short of explaining what it is used to signify in the video.

Brilliant

But Professor James Smalls, of the University of Maryland, described the video — directed by Ricky Saiz, who also made the Beyonce clip “Yonce” — as “arresting... I would even go so far as to say brilliant.”

He argued that it “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,” he wrote in Frieze magazine.

“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 refused to say how much the couple paid to shoot

member of elite realtor organization the National Association of Realtors and the California Association of Realtors. He is survived by his father, his mother and his biological half-brother, Ronnie. (RTRS)

NEW YORK:

Two of the thousands of music fans who paid top dollar for a luxurious festival in the Bahamas but found squalor instead are getting money back — $5 million worth.

In the first damages awarded over last year’s ill-fated Fyre Festival, a judge in Raleigh, North Carolina

handed two fans each $1.5 million in compensation including for mental anguish plus $1 million each in punitive damages, far more than the minimum sought.

Seth Crossno and Mark Thompson said that they shelled out $13,000 with a promise of exclusive accommodation on a private island but instead wound up in a relief camp-style tent and left when they felt unsafe.

The Fyre Festival was abruptly canceled and attendees evacuated, leading to online mockery of many of the young fans who had bought into the advertising of the event as their video in front of the “Mona Lisa”, the “Venus de Milo” and Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa”, in which Jay-Z poses looking up at the muscled black hero at the apex of the canvas.

The Louvre’s director Jean-Luc Martinez has said that he wants to make the museum’s vast collection “more readable” for a wide, global public.

Last year more than two-thirds of its 8.1 million visitors were foreigners, half of whom were under 30.

OTTAWA, Ontario:

Also:

American singer-songwriter Moses Sumney canceled his Tuesday night performance at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, protesting the event’s ties to a show on slavery performed by whites.

The black entertainer criticized the festival for supporting “SLAV,” a theatrical production on black slavery that he said constitutes cultural appropriation. Instead of performing at the festival, he played two back-to-back shows Tuesday night at a Montreal club venue.

“SLAV,” directed by Robert Lepage and starring Betty Bonifassi, sparked protests in Montreal last week, with its critics arguing it appropriates black culture. In the production, the predominantly white cast dresses as cotton pickers and poor field workers and sings old slave songs.

“Their songs are taken from them by white people and performed to rooms full of other white people for high ticket prices,” Sumney wrote in a letter to festival organizers that he also published on his Tumblr blog. “I much would have preferred seeing actual black Americans sing their own slave songs.”

Bonifassi told the Montreal Gazette last week that she didn’t “feel badly at all” about the production. “I don’t see color. To me, it doesn’t exist, physically or in music,” she said.

In his letter to the festival, Sumney criticized Bonifassi’s comments, saying that “the solution to racism is not to erase race altogether.”

He also compared “SLAV” to blackface minstrel shows. “The only thing missing is black paint,” he wrote.

When contacted by The Associated Press, the jazz festival’s media relations director, Greg Kitzler, said, “We respect his decision and hope Moses Sumney will perform at the festival in a near future.”

Kitzler declined to comment on whether the festival would continue supporting “SLAV,” but added that a press release planned for Wednesday would offer clarification.

The play is scheduled to run until July 14 as part of the festival’s 39th edition. Thousands of musical acts have performed at the fest over the years, including Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King and Diana Ross.

a uniquely high-end music party. (AFP)

LOS ANGELES:

Richard Swift, a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer who worked with the Black Keys, the Shins and many others, died Tuesday in Tacoma, Washington, at the age of 41, according to a post on his Facebook page; a rep confirmed the news to Pitchfork and other outlets. The cause of death has not been announced; in June a GoFundMe effort was launched for him to help cover medical bills for an unspecified OSLO, July 4, (AFP): The traditional concert after the annual awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize on Dec 10 in Oslo will not be staged this year due to financial difficulties, the organisers said Tuesday.

“There will be no Nobel Peace Prize concert” in 2018, said a statement from the Nobel Institute, Warner Bros Norway and the Gyro Event company.

“The decision emerges from a wish to re-think the concert format and content but also reflects the challenging financial situation of the concert in recent years,” it added.

“life-threatening condition.”

“Today the world lost one of the most talented musicians I know,” Dan Auerbach, Swift’s bandmate in the Black Keys and the Arcs, wrote in an Instagram post. “I will miss you my friend.”

Swift was a remarkably prolific and multi-talented musician, releasing multiple solo albums and EPs as well as being a member of the Shins from 2011 to 2016; the touring bassist for the Black Keys in 2014; and drummer for the Arcs. (RTRS)

LOS ANGELES:

Garbage’s lead singer Shirley Manson has written a moving op-ed about self-harm called “The First Time I Cut Myself,” which was published today in the New York Times.

In it, she recalls the negative selfimage that led her to begin harming herself as a teenager, and spoke of how the urge returned even at the height of her fame. She writes:

The first time I cut myself, I was sitting on the edge of a bed inside my boyfriend’s flat. It was late. He and I had been arguing for some time, our voices gradually becoming more and more raised. I was concerned that we might wake his flat-mates, and in a moment of utter exasperation, I reached across for my little silver penknife, pulled it from the lace of my shoe and ran the tiny blade across the skin of one ankle. It didn’t hurt. I did it again. And then I did it again. I looked dispassionately at the three thin red lines I had made and watched as tiny little bubbles of my blood oozed to the surface. (RTRS)