Posted to Beyoncé’s personal website were fifty-one photos documenting the trio’s traipse through the museum’s uncharacteristically empty exhibition halls and salons. Some of these pictures single out individual artworks, most emphasize the family’s playful activities among the displays, but all brandish the caption, “My Life,” swallowing up the Louvre’s unique existence into the spectacle that is Beyoncé and Jay-Z.
The surrender Lewis calls us to when engaging with art is also a good model for engaging with others: “Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way,” advice that seems almost foreign in today’s celebration of self-aggrandizement, conspicuous and rabid consumption and consumerism.By hosting the famous family and providing the backdrop for images of their domestic intimacy, the Louvre has stepped into the internet spotlight. And—right on cue—the web immediately exploded in response: people wrote in support of the family’s visit and subsequent photo-share, in reverent attention, in enjoyment, in quizzical curiosity, in amusement, in annoyance. Regardless of one’s take on the Knowles-Carters’ trip, it was difficult to remain ignorant of it.US Magazine called the pics of Blue Ivy frolicking on an air vent her Marilyn Monroe moment. NY Daily News highlighted the fashion displayed in the images, detailing Beyoncé’s, Jay-Z’s, and the child’s outfits and accessories. They also noted the family’s apparent affection for one another highlighted by the images.
Vanity Fair obliged their celebrity-aware—not to say smitten—readers by offering up the news in mocking derision. Their coverage took jabs laced with snark at the self-importance they saw at work in the pics—the privilege communicated by the family’s personal tour of the typically public space, the incongruous disjunction of fine and pop art, and the questionable decision to bring the not-quite-three-year-old along.
Kyle Chaka sees these pictures as representative of the current popular understanding of fine art. In his rant against taking selfies at museums, he notes that although art adorns the backdrop of Beyoncé’s pics, “[n]owhere do they appear to be thinking about what’s on display.” True enough, as finding the names of many of the art pieces captured by the photos was a challenge, with the selfie-statue (Apollo Slaying the Python) posing the most difficulty. Peruse through the pictures on Beyoncé’s website, or even the news stories on the couple’s visit; nowhere to be found are so much as the names of the majority of pieces, the Mona Lisa a strategic exception because of its own iconic status. Whatever this photo shoot was about, it wasn’t about appreciating the art.
Girodet’s The Sleep of Endymion, Veronese’s The Marriage at Cana, Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, David’s The Coronation of Napoleon, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace become merely props to the family’s celebrity status. (Just how important must one be to get so close to da Vinci’s masterpiece? And nobody—well, almost nobody—gets the place to themselves.) The museum’s elaborate ceiling becomes canvas for Beyoncé’s “throwing up the roc”; the Mona Lisa, an opportunity for displaying deuces. These pictures transform both family life and cultural engagement into a media event, a publicity shoot.
In that way, perhaps, the famous couple is no different from many contemporary museum visitors. While touring the Louvre a few years back, New York Times writer Michael Kimmelman lamented that “[a]lmost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute,” barely enough time to take notice of a painting, let alone to understand or appreciate it. Some of this, of course, stems from the inaccessibility most of us have to fine art’s history or techniques. Kimmelman adds that the ubiquity of alienating technology—such as cell phones, computer screens, and camera lenses—encourages us to believe we can capture and contain the beauty of the world around us and, therefore, need not pause to reflect on an object’s value in the moment at hand.
Granting those points, I think there’s something more troubling at work in Bey’s pics, something I think we might all fall prey to at times. The focus of these pictures runs roughshod over the inherent value of the art works on display in the museum, co-opting their cultural (or other) significance and exploiting it for Knowles-Carters’ own purposes. In turn, we—the viewers of Beyoncé’s website—are encouraged to use these supposedly-personal family images for our own ends, to tweet them, to pin them, to Facebook them. To consume them in our own way.
And more: to purchase Beyoncé’s products, to consume her music, to buy tickets to her shows. She is no longer a person to be honored and valued but an object to be acquired. Beyoncé and Jay-Z, of course, are no oddity; such is the way of our consumer-centric culture. But the matter-of-course nature of this mentality renders it no less problematic. Augustine, in his On Christian Doctrine, identifies this error as using something that is meant to be enjoyed; what drives such behavior, Augustine says, is cupiditas—a desire to consume and possess, not caritas—a genuine love and respect for the other.
Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s romp through the Louvre, punctuated by posts to her website, highlights this disturbing trend, which encourages consumption and possession of anything of value rather than making space for it, allowing it to work on us rather than forcing ourselves upon it and overwriting its significance for our own purposes. In this latest example, we don’t see or appreciate the art itself; we see Beyoncé, we see Jay-Z. The pictures are filled with contemporary iconography: cameras, selfies, modern-day apparel, jewelry, cultural signs, phones, logos, icons. We see ourselves, our way of life. But such a form of cultural engagement is recipe for entrapment, not transcendence.
In his Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis critiques this self-centric attitude, specifically when encountering works of art, suggesting instead our attention should be directed outwardly. “We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it,” he would remind us.Although Lewis is speaking here specifically about artistic engagement, the advice is generalizable. The surrender Lewis calls us to when engaging with art is also a good model for engaging with others: “Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way,” advice that seems almost foreign in today’s celebration of self-aggrandizement, conspicuous and rabid consumption and consumerism.
When society’s prevailing myth-making institutions reinforce rather than resist such self-centric orientations, a problem already indigenous to the human condition—Martin Luther called this tendency homo incurvatus in se, man turned in on himself—becomes endemic.
The subtext behind Beyoncé’s pictures is but one small microcosm of this feature of American culture irremediably fixated on the image, with scant concern for analysis, evaluation, or context; depth, texture, or deeper meaning. These pictures portray a culture fixated on fame, enamored of itself, and bereft of discernment, but Beyoncé’s website is one of the more innocuous of such instances; it is hardly an anomaly, just one of the more obvious and lamentable examples to point out.