![jay z on to the next one art jay z on to the next one art](https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5cf144d6142c500008f463fb/960x0.jpg)
More important is to drill down to what the visual does to us and what we do to images. It is impossible to know the origin story of each image, to know what every allusion refers to, to get the power dynamics in every representation. This commitment is complicated as it implicates audiences in vast systems and symbols that no one can fully grasp all of the time. Around all of us, images demand from audiences, they want audiences to commit. The desire to understand every image, to see it all clearly, to muster the cognitive control to override visual coercions is folly. Whichever way one turns, there is no clarity on the meaning and power and boundaries of visual culture. Can we even know what we want from images, or is all of this wanting predetermined for us? Even this “data” is tied to previous ideas about perception and coercive capitalist imperatives. More and more neurological and psychological data suggests that people are powerless not to see and not to narrate what they see in ways that are externally triggered. What happens when the visual pushes back against our stories? Images want things from audiences, and they can take them, aggressively and very often without consent. What he means here is that we need to not get so hung up on the thing, the art, or the image that we miss the bigger questions and problems, and thus the bigger story. Mirzoe, for example, suggests that in order to define “visual culture” we need to heed the questions more than the objects. This more optimistic and open version of visual culture has been articulated before. Yet what if this vexing “problem” of too much visual culture is not a problem at all? What if too many images and too many people talking about the visual are the heroic outcome, and not the declension, of the story? We are repeatedly told that we live in the age of the visual, that we are overwhelmed with images and choices of images almost weekly there are reports about how the visual and screens are shifting our cognitive abilities and destroying our perception and concentration. “Visual intelligence” is becoming its own self-help category, one that offers nothing short of “changing your life” and “art as therapy.” Even if you don’t “know” who Beyoncé and Jay-Z are and why they are in the Louvre, we can start thinking about visual culture by asking why those particular images were made in a particular way.Īdditionally, there is great anxiety in this particular historical moment about the changing conditions of visual culture: what it is, who controls it, how it is used to control us, who gets to study it, who makes money off it, what its boundaries are.
#Jay z on to the next one art how to
There is a whole genre of books that aims to teach audiences how to see: more creatively, more actively, with better perception. Visual culture seems implicated in this fear of not getting it, not seeing what you are supposed to, not being included: visual culture as #fomo. If you didn’t know the space already or weren’t looking very hard, you could miss that the video was filmed at the Louvre, one of the most famous and arguably most important museums in the world. It was a fairly typical music video, featuring the artists’ undeniable style and gravitas, amazing clothes, and incredible dancers in an opulent setting.
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Yet, at the same moment, there were likely a very large group of viewers who did not understand what the fuss was about. And every art history/visual culture major in the world finally felt some justification in their educational choices. Reading lists, art history lessons, and crowdsourced syllabi proliferated. While it is now cliché to say that a meme, image, or film “broke the internet,” for a large population of people the internet was not just broken but quaking when Beyoncé and Jay-Z dropped the video for their 2018 single “Apeshit.”ĭepicting the celebrity power couple engaging the Western art canon and its many exclusions in the Louvre in Paris, the video went viral instantly and just as quickly generated dozens of think-pieces about art, race, power, and the ability to manipulate and even reinscribe museum spaces in the spirit of movements such as #blacklivesmatter and #decolonizethismuseum.