Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and Albert Murray

Among the musical

- By Tony Scherman

Three or four years ago, coming back from hip surgery, I put in a stint of physical therapy. The assistant trainer, a 24-year-old named Caitlin, was a big pop music fan, as am I, although, to borrow from one of Hank Williams Jr.'s songs about his daddy, Caitlin's kind of pop and mine ain't exactly the same. One afternoon at Procore Physical Therapy, the talk turned to Beyoncé and Jay-Z's video, shot in the Louvre, for their 2018 collaborative single "Apeshit," released under their marital name, the Carters. Caitlin didn't bat an eyelash at the idea of pop music's power couple posing themselves and their dancers in front of some of Western art's signal achievements, including the Mona Lisa, except to think that it was a cool idea.

To Caitlin, the Carters’ ouevre, solo or as a duo, is entirely on a par with da Vinci’s. To me, Caitlin’s thinking exemplified a disturbing, growing refusal to distinguish between levels of aesthetic experience. Their terrific chops notwithstanding, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are essentially (I didn’t say entirely) a commercial enterprise that designs and constantly retrofits its products to make as much money as possible. The Mona Lisa is … not that. The