The Louvre started as a fortress for the French monarchy, and initially held the royal collection of art – not as a museum open to the public, but for friends of the king and his family to enjoy privately. “And I think anytime you are working on behalf of the public, you better be really concerned about the implications of what your work does and the narratives that you put out for other people, because whether or not they’re explicit or implicit, those narratives have power.” “What I hope it’s doing is reminding people who work in museums that there are myriad ways to interpret what is on the walls and that one of those ways is by considering where it is placed, how it is understood, and ways to bring in other narratives,” Kletchka said. These juxtapositions, the researchers said, can help museum curators, educators and exhibition designers and others who decide how art is displayed to think about why it is important to bring artists who are not white and who are not male – the two demographics that have defined the museum-art world for much of history – into their galleries. In the video, Beyoncé and Jay-Z stand in front of it, dressed in what looks like royal robes. The sphinx shows the body of a lion with the head of a king. One exception is the Great Sphinx of Tanis, which was found in the ruins of the former capital of Egypt and acquired by the Louvre in 1826. The dancers are all Black, and the works of art almost exclusively feature white subjects – and were almost exclusively created by white artists. Beyoncé and a line of dancers hold hands in front of a massive painting of Napoleon’s coronation. A Black woman tenderly combs out a Black man’s hair, seated in front of the Mona Lisa. Beyoncé, dressed in flowing white fabric, dances in front of a statue of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. The rest of the video is an essay in juxtaposition, the researchers said: Dancers move in front of immobile art. Then, inside the famous museum: images of a painted ceiling, and of Beyoncé and Jay-Z, standing in front of the Mona Lisa, knowing half-smiles on their faces, like that of the famous painting. The camera pulls back, and shows his ripped jeans, dreadlocked hair and brown skin. The Beyoncé video was released in June 2018, and, almost immediately, journalists and cultural critics noticed and wrote about the statement Beyoncé and Jay-Z were making.Ī summation for those who haven’t seen the video: It starts outside the Louvre, in the heart of Paris, where an angel crouches in the dark. “And if you’re a museum worker and you’re not considering the real world implications of your work, then you are not doing your job.” “Museums were created for certain people to feel comfortable in the galleries, and if that is how your museum is operating, you are not grappling with the real world,” said Dana Carlisle Kletchka, assistant professor of art museum education at Ohio State and co-author of the paper. Work with the communities around them, rather than separately from those communities. This especially applies to Black and brown women, the researchers argue.
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