Beyoncé does not blot out the Venus de Milo she dances next to it. They are interested, instead, in playing with tableaux. Their engagement with the European canon housed in the Louvre, their physical proximity to it, shouldn’t be flattened into a shorthand for transgression.

The Carters are omnivorous in their relationship to media, equally influenced by the Hellenistic era’s religious ecstasies as by Deana Lawson’s fantasies of black intimacy, by Pipilotti Rist’s warped ebullience as by the cultural legacy of Basquiat. Both interpretations seem to me too prescriptive, and belie the video’s actual verve. Already, overheated readings of the “Apeshit” video have attempted to glom onto one of two opposing ideologies: either Beyoncé and Jay-Z are priests of capitalism who appreciate art only to the extent that it reflects their wealth, or they are radicals who have smuggled blackness into a space where it has traditionally been overlooked or exploited. In one exception, Beyoncé and her dancers, with a synchronicity that immediately recalls the choreography of “Formation,” body-roll in front of “The Coronation of Napoleon.” A crew of black women gyrating in front of a massive colonial scene is the sort of heavy-handed image that the Internet salivates over.

(“My great-great-grandchildren already rich / That’s a lot of brown on your Forbes list,” Beyoncé raps, haughtily.) Saiz often captures the couple standing or sitting still, holding court with the same air of permanence as the art-historical treasures around them. Beyoncé and Jay-Z seem to suggest that their own footprint will be as indelible as that of the entire canon of Western art. But the video is a display of something that can’t be so easily quantified: influence. Twelve years ago, it was all about the Audemars Piguet watch now it’s G8 jets and diamonds as translucent as glass. “Apeshit” is a gospel of acquisition, recalling in spirit the luxury-brand name-checking of the couple’s duet “Upgrade U,” from 2006. On “Drunk in Love,” Jay-Z raps that their foreplay ruined one of his Warhols Beyoncé shot the music video for “7/11” on an iPhone in the Tribeca apartment that they once owned, where works by Richard Prince and David Hammons were unceremoniously on view. In the past, the Carters have been accused of being art fetishists. Wearing complementary suits-Beyoncé’s pink, Jay’s seafoam green-they are flanking the “Mona Lisa” once again. He rubs his hands, bells gong, and then a wide shot captures the celestial activity on the ceilings of the Galerie d’Apollon, filtered through a multi-colored glow of music-video light. He crouches outside the museum, like an artwork that has been brought to life and set loose. Directed by Ricky Saiz, it opens with the image of a black man, in fashionably torn jeans and worn sneakers, with giant white wings attached to his back. The six-minute “Apeshit” video is a feast of juxtapositions. To celebrate, and to make ostentatiously official their consolidation of power, they’ve returned to the Louvre, not as tourists but as bosses. The storm has been weathered, Beyoncé and Jay-Z want us to know, and it has made their unit stronger. “Everything Is Love,” by contrast, is slick and effervescent, triumphant, a return to the outlaw motif that the couple embraced years before. The previous two installments, Beyoncé’s “ Lemonade” and Jay-Z’s “4:44,” were labors of gut-wrenching introspection, chronicling the crisis in the couple’s marriage after Jay-Z’s admissions of cheating. The album, which the couple surprise-released on Saturday, during their “On the Run II Tour,” completes a meditative trilogy about infidelity and forgiveness. The music video for “ Apeshit,” a song from “Everything Is Love,” their new joint album, finds Jay-Z and Beyoncé back in the Louvre, but much has changed since their visit in 2014.

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