Young Thug, But Make It High Art: Hip-Hop Crashes the Canon
Back in 2016, Dutch photographer Hajar Benjida started to notice similarities between photos of Young Thug and portraits from throughout art history. She decided to collage some of the images together for a school project, then uploaded these splits to a new Instagram account, @youngthugaspaintings. It quickly went viral, but the schtick had legs—her most recent posts continue to rake in thousands of likes.
Flash forward to this week, when it was announced that Benjida, in collaboration with Thugger, would be presenting her works in an IRL exhibition at the Scope Art Fair at Art Basel in Miami next month. “I jokingly answered an interview question with ‘I hope to discuss Renaissance paintings with Thug someday.’ A year and a half later and I’m bringing my project to life together with Young Thug himself,” Benjida said in a statement.
The juxtaposition remains weirdly perfect: Young Thug just seems to make sense next to all these luscious and extravagant oil paintings (or even as one—see his “Homie” video). Maybe it’s because of his avant-garde lewks, his chiseled cheekbones, or his modelesque stature. Even when he paused a NYFW show to adjust a model’s clothes in the middle of the runway, he did it with grace and authority. Young Thug’s just a really regal-looking dude.
But Benjida’s project also holds deeper meaning: It subverts the extremely white, highbrow art-history canon by asking the viewer to imagine a rapper where they historically see the alabaster faces of the noble and wealthy. In this sense, the inclusion of “Young Thug as Paintings” at an established (though admittedly über-trendy) art festival like Art Basel is—yes, even despite being co-sponsored by Thug’s label 300—one step further on the path of black musicians forging a space within the fine-art world. Maybe museums and art festivals view this as a way to capture young audiences, but there will be an impact long-term to seeing these kinds of figures included.
Over the last few years, JAY-Z and the Knowles sisters have made breaking down the doors of art institutions one of their missions. Jay put a twist on performance-art vet Marina Abramović’s “The Artist is Present” in 2013, rapping for hours and hours in a New York gallery. Yeah, it was pretty corny, but his whole Magna Carta Holy Grail album cycle did open up mainstream conversations about rap’s place in art history.
Fast forward to 2016, when Solange nodded to the Mona Lisa in her A Seat at the Table cover and then created a haven for blackness at the Guggenheim with her “An Ode To” performance the following spring. Then earlier this year, Beyoncé and Jay took over the Louvre for the “APESHIT” video, posing and strutting around iconic piece of art after iconic piece of art.
This concept of busting open the canon has become so prevalent that even Spotify jumped on it for a marketing stunt to promote their marquee playlist. The “RapCaviar Pantheon,” held briefly last year at the Brooklyn Museum, capitalized on the the idea of the hip-hop set as the new American royalty by portraying 21 Savage, SZA, and Metro Boomin as Greco-Roman sculptures.
None of this is technically new, of course. For years, the brilliant painter Kehinde Wiley has been subverting the idea of formal portraiture by creating epic depictions of LL Cool J, Ice-T, Grandmaster Flash, and other rappers with Rococo-inspired flair. If Wiley’s name sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because he painted Obama’s infinitely meme-able presidential portrait. Perhaps the next subject worthy of a Wiley portrait would be Thugger himself. I mean, we already know the Slime Lord looks right at home alongside Renaissance paintings.
