Beyoncé vs. Jay-Z, or Art Between Regimes

When the video for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s single “Apeshit” dropped in June 2018, it divided its audience. One side marveled at the couple’s solo evening tour through the Louvre, its “masterpiece theater” overturning a millennial taboo on Black bodies centered by White museum exhibition frames. At the same time, another faction emerged, for whom the video was an epic act of capitalist triumphalism. In this talk, this presenter suspends this canonical pop antagonism and considers “Apeshit” emblematic of current “interregnum art” in the sense famously articulated by Antonio Gramsci nearly a century ago: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”