By Tamara Yeshurun, Staff Writer
In 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z released a music video that turned heads both in and out of the pop culture world. The star of the production? The Louvre art museum in Paris. It was in that very location, home to the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, Liberty Leading the People, and countless other seminal works of Western art, that the couple filmed their song, “Apeshit.”
Many in the media were abuzz with excitement about the video, a flurry of articles such as “Beyoncé and Jay Z’s New Vision of Gender in ‘Apeshit’” and “The Genius of Beyoncé and Jay Z at the Louvre” lauding it as deeply conceptual and revolutionary. One glowing review read, “[The song] places the uniquely American art form of rap on the same level with European masterpieces, and it corrects the lack of diversity that is often taken for granted in cultural institutions.”Another gushed, “Without a doubt, Beyoncé and Jay Z are inserting themselves into the Western art canon and advocating for the importance and inclusion of persons of color in the hallowed halls of Western Civilization.”
To me, it felt like it had accomplished the opposite. Far from honoring artistic talent which has been historically underrepresented in such museums, the video starkly exposed the poverty of contemporary art. However, it was not the song itself that bothered me; people are entitled to listen to whatever they like. What disturbed me was the seriousness of its reception.
Pop culture witnessed a similar moment before the start of the 2024 – 2025 academic year, when several notable universities (among them Harvard and Stanford) began to offer courses on Taylor Swift. “In a harmonious transition from literary greats William Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Burt will delve into how Swift’s writing provides a front row seat to the human experience.” The juxtaposition suggests a comparability of caliber and significance. But Taylor Swift is not a Wordsworth. She is not a Mozart, nor is she a Shakespeare (and my failing Buzzfeed’s “Shakespeare or Taylor Swift?” quiz more likely proves my own ignorance than it does her poetic genius.) A course about the “Taylor Swift phenomenon” may provide an illuminating glimpse into the sociology of popular icons, but her poetry simply does not merit that level of analysis.
These cases do not exist in a vacuum. They are symptomatic of two impulses that characterize art in the twenty-first century. The first is that, in order to earn the title, art must make a politically audacious statement – the more alarming, the better. The second is that art is measured by the gratification of the beholder. The former approach dismisses aesthetics almost on principle (even encouraging repellence); the latter drains art of all depth, and then laughs at the notion of a definition in the first place.
So, let me say it: not all art is created equal.
At first glance, I may appear to be viciously biased in favor of archaic societal norms. Long ago, some stuffy elitists placed certain artists on an arbitrary pedestal, and I embarrassingly bought into it. Don’t I realize that expertise, refinement, and beauty are constructs that continually morph and change with the times?
The second argument that can be used against me is that, if I am affronted by crassness, then I am naive. Art has never been prim and proper; Mozart was wildly irreverent in his day. The invention of the sonnet scandalized a generation who, accustomed to long form poetry, wept about the attention spans of the youth. Additionally, how many nude statues clutter the halls of famous museums? Why am I not offended by those? Daring artists become mellow giants with the passage of time, and the same will happen to us.
Third of all, if I think I can measure art by its originality, I am simply ignorant. Do I sincerely believe that any piece is totally innovative? Art doesn’t fall out of coconut trees; all art takes inspiration from that which came before it. Additionally, when it comes to inspiration, the truth is that “back then,” artists, musicians, and novelists were usually commissioned to make pieces for other people. It was their salary, and in many cases their creativity was restricted to what was asked of them by royal courts.
And, lastly, art is art! Art defies discipline by its very nature; art is flighty, indefinable, personal, boundless, free…
Who is to say that “Apeshit” doesn’t belong at the Louvre?
This “anything goes” attitude towards art traces itself back to Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917. Entered into an art contest (much to the chagrin of the organizers), it was nothing more than a urinal, sloppily signed “R. Mutt, 1917.” At the time, it ended up in a trash heap. Today the piece fetches close to two million dollars. Reflecting on this, an article in The Behavioral Scientist asks the obvious question, “[If] we have no way of objectively determining the value of any work of art or the performance of its maker… how, then, do we explain the myriad of masterpieces that have fetched more than a hundred million dollars in recent decades?” The answer is disheartening: “One hangs on a kitchen refrigerator, the other on a gallery wall.” Without any measurement of skill or aesthetics to tether it to reality, nothing but a signature and the applause of the elite make it anything other than discarded junk. In plain English, that is what we call a scam.
How, then, should art be measured?
If you can only tell that it is artwork because somebody has slapped a plaque beside it – then it is not, in fact, art. If it is easily replicable, if it is simplistic in form and shallow in meaning, if it is a megaphone for ideology, or if it is downright ugly, it is certainly not great art. This also goes for pieces made centuries ago: generating false admiration after sneaking a glance at the date is condescending to the artist. Sublimity in art does not mean a replication of the past; far from it. Not all art was great in “the good old days.” And something equally true: not all art today is miserable!
In our day, there are many innovative artists, composers, poets, novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers who excel at their craft, create beautiful things, meaningful things, and manage to avoid the soapbox. In 2019 then fifteen-year old Alma Deutscher showcased her orchestral piece “Siren Sounds Waltz.” The orchestra begins by simulating the ugly cacophony of a city street, only to transform those same sounds into a swellingly beautiful symphony. In defiance of the degeneration of contemporary art, Deutscher described her composition thus,“[S]ome people have told me that nowadays… music must reflect the ugliness of the modern world. Well, in this waltz, instead of trying to make my music artificially ugly in order to reflect the modern world, I went in exactly the opposite direction. I took some ugly sounds from the modern world, and I tried to turn them into something more beautiful, true music.”
To determine whether art is “great,” look to both the form and the content. In terms of form, when in doubt choose harmony over disorder, beauty over ugliness, intricacy over simplicity, and skill over replicability (of course, being mindful of the techniques and materials that were available to the given artist.) When it comes to content, choose taste over bawdiness, meaningfulness over finger-pointing, and timeless universality over kitschy vagueness.
Now where, you might ask, is my indignation at the Broadway show & Juliet, which is a clear distortion of the original Shakespeare? Or, for that matter, The Lion King? Where is my outrage at Ariana Grande’s remix of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Favorite Things” to “I want it, I got it?” Alright, The Sound of Music might not be high culture. But on that score, I want to stress that high culture is not everything. There is a place for hype around celebrities, for gratification and gaudiness, for impetuous disorder, and for sentimentality, cliches, and soapboxes. The folk tavern songs of then may be the TikTok dances of today. In fact, those are the things that generate the youthful flavor of the decade, and will eventually become nostalgic to our descendants. But we should not equate indulgence or sensationalism with genuine quality. Doing so only degrades the depth and magnificence that human beings are truly capable of.
When we consider the many voices which have been tragically omitted from the story of artistic greatness, it should inspire us to extend the search onto farther shores, not into shallower waters. Let us restore trust in our ability to recognize such greatness, and see past the crooning two-dimensionality of our time. Our predecessors selected what to bequeath to successive generations with great care. It is our duty to do the same.
Photo Caption: The Louvre museum in Paris, France
Photo Credit: Unsplash